


Unmarked

by Psythe



Category: Warhammer 40.000
Genre: Chaos, F/M, Fall to Chaos, Female Protagonist, Gen, Inquisition, Original Character(s), Original Female Character(s) - Freeform, POV Original Female Character, Planetary Defense Force - Warhammer 40k, REALLY Radical Inquisition, Radical Inquisition, Tragedy
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-06-24
Updated: 2014-07-18
Packaged: 2018-02-06 00:42:27
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 38,636
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1838098
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Psythe/pseuds/Psythe
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Imperium has a long and storied history of creating its own worst enemies.</p><p>Half a millennium ago, Eva Notte's homeworld was the beginning and ending of a war that almost set Calixis ablaze. The birthplace of a lord of Chaos capable of raising a revolution, and the site of her final battle, where the earth was consecrated by the blood of a saint and an arch-heretic.</p><p>Figures grown from such soil cast long shadows.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue

_Who are you, you that I dream of, even when my eyes are open?_

  
_What is your name?_

  
_What do you look like?_

  
_What is the sound of your voice?_

  
_I don't know, you see. When I see you in my dreams, I can only see the person you have the potential to become._

  
_I see the ripples in the future that each and every one of your actions create. I hear destiny resound with every step you take. I see the world, the world as you will reforge it to be._

  
_The world built in your image._

  
_And so brightly shines that image that I cannot see the you of now, the you that is real._

  
_Who are you?_

  
_I look forward to finding out._


	2. Act I, Chapter One: Dearest

**I**

**THE EMPEROR'S WORK**

 

* * *

_  
Dearest,_

_I’m sorry it’s been so long since I’ve written. Training ended a week ago, and we’ve been settling into our new base. I’m officially a PDF soldier now, Holling. We have been digging earthworks and building more fortifications, and the lieutenant has had us practicing harder than ever. I haven’t had time to write._

_I miss you. I miss everything about you. I wish you had been here a week ago. One of the malcontents picked a fight in the mess in the last week of training. I defended my own honor and got a black eye and a week of latrine duty. If you had been there, Holling, I wouldn’t have gotten so angry. I think things like that every day. I miss you so much._

_But this has been worth it, I promise. I am good at this, Holling. I’ve learned so much. I’ve learned to wield a sword. Slice. Parry. Dodge. Thrust. The thrust is my best move - the lieutenant commended me for swordsmanship last time we sparred!. Says I’m the best in the company. And my assault sergeant taught me to pluck a hair from my head and split it on my blade to see how sharp it is. We march every day. And all the digging, like I said - I’m in such good shape, Holling. You’ll love what it’s done for me. I know I do._

_This is getting too long and rambling - trust me, I’m a better soldier than I am a writer. Everyone in my unit is. We’re going to chop these heretic savages into lunch meat, and then_

  
A left hand tapped Eva’s shoulder, and when she looked up, its right slid in, and snatched the letter from her.

Instinct, driven by anger, took control of her, and Eva's elbow jabbed back and buried itself in a stomach. Then the crook of her arm swung up and behind her, and her knuckles collided with a face. It was Kyndi Dov's face. Eva knew it was Kyndi Dov's face, because a moment after she connected, Kyndi Dov howled in pain, and her voice was almost as distinctive as Eva's.

Eva rose from her cot and turned, in time to see the other trooper fall back onto the next cot over. Dov landed on Svanka Pya, and they both landed in a heap. There was blood on Dov's face, streaming out from between the fingers she had clamped over her nose.

Eva picked the letter up from where it had fallen, just in time for Valdez to step into the block.

"What the hell is going on on here?" The lieutenant demanded. Every woman in a2-b snapped to attention, including Tarvre Roye who was trying to pull a shirt over her head. He looked at Dov with her bloodied face.

“Brawling?” he said. “I am disappointed." Kyndi pointed at Eva. Eva saluted.

“Sir! I was writing a private letter. Dov stole it. It was my business. I took it back.” Valdez strode up to her and held out his hand expectantly. Eva hesitated for a moment, and then handed him the letter. Valdez scanned it.

“Corporal Notte. This is addressed to whom?”

“My husband, sir.” she said quietly.

The lieutenant examined her letter a moment more, and then handed it back to her. “Clear that beginning.” He said in an undertone. "No mention of defensive preparations. It'll just get blackbarred."

Eva swallowed. “Thank you, sir.”

He stepped back and raised his voice again. “Corporal Notte, Trooper Dov, for brawling in barracks you’re both to serve an extra shift on watch for the rest of the week.” He turned to leave. “Parade ground in twenty minutes, Defense Force.”

 _I’m going to come home to you,_ she wrote hurriedly, _and straighten all of this out._

_Missing you,_

_Scaea_

 

  
 **6.40 Terran (sidereal)**  
 **Planet Adobe**  
 **Forward Outpost Quintus Secundus**  
 **13th Volunteers, St. Michel, 3rd Division**  
 **1st Assault Company, 2nd Platoon**  
 **Day 5 of deployment**  
  
And extra watches was all he gave you?” Dahlia shook her head in disbelief.

“Yeah.” Eva snapped the focus lens back into her pistol. Her voice was subdued. “He’s probably married.”

Dahlia raised an eyebrow and paused (she was already disassembling her own gun a second time). “Why do you say that?”

“Because,” Eva replied in an undertone, “I was writing to my husband. For the first time in weeks. The look in his eyes said he understood.”

“Oh.” Dahlia was twenty-one, five years younger than Eva. Her eyes darted to the thin silver chain around Eva‘s neck.

“Dov deserved it anyway.” she said, changing the subject. “She can’t keep her hands to herself.”

“I may have broken her nose.” Eva admitted. She reconnected the feeder port at the top of the trigger housing.

Dahlia nodded vigorously. “Good! Teach her a lesson. If she carries on like this she’ll end up in front of the commissar, and no one wants that. Especially not her.”

Eva reattached the pistol’s barrel, screwed it on, murmured the Machine-God‘s Benediction of Accuracy, and settled the plastek casing back home. Then she turned to Dahlia. “Do you think I should talk to her? If she holds a grudge over this-”

“She will.”

“-IF she holds a grudge over this she might become a real problem. We‘re not in fundamental anymore, I have to handle this.” She dry-fired the pistol, then did it twice more.

“Hell,” said Dahlia, just now finishing her own second weapon check, “I’d talk to Sergeant Koth. Let her know Platoon’s not going to tolerate this shit. Not after-”

“No.” Eva shook her head. “If I bring in the sergeant Kyndi’ll look at me like a schoolgirl running to the master. She already thinks I’m soft.”

“Maybe you better hit her again.”

The whistle blew for inspection. Eva tugged on the chain and pulled out the locket that hung on the end of it from under her uniform. She thought about opening it, but just clasped it for luck and put it back under her fatigues. She slid a cell into the pistol and holstered it. “Maybe.”

 

*    *    *

  
  
By trade, Eva was an administrator. A manufactorum manager. She reported to the Imperial supervisory department for the entirety of St. Michel. She had authority over fifty-five workers and ten industrial servitors. Her block manufacted shaped plastek, for packaging non-fragile goods, or electrical casing, or low-grade tableware. Eva’s block supplied most of central St. Michel with all the manufacted shaped plastek it could ever need, and it did so efficiently.

Of course, being an efficient manufactorum manager had much less to do with actual managerial skill than with one’s level of tolerance for sitting in an office eight hours out of an eleven-hour work cycle, running endless ledgers through a sluggish old arithmometer that had probably been around since the Great Crusade. The other three hours per cycle saw her doing the rounds; ensuring that the workers were always industrious and that the machinery was functioning properly and that production did not drop below acceptable levels.

Eva’s tolerance for this was not particularly high, but it was higher than most, and so she was considered a good manager.

Very occasionally, she was given a bonus.

Factorum procedure was set by the supervisory department. The conveyors and vats and industrial stamp-drivers were maintained by the handful of machinists and the single tech-adept on staff. Eva made sure that she knew the operations of the factorum inside and out, just in case it was ever important, but it never was.

Once, she had noticed a shameful inefficiency in the operation of the factorum, one that might have increased output by as much as fourteen percent had it been corrected. She had drafted a letter to the supervisory department, but upon asking one of her line chiefs’ opinion on it, he advised her in no uncertain terms not to send it, that the head of the supervisory department was a confident man who did not like being told that his job could be done by a manager without a four thousand crown universitariat engineering degree.

She noticed other inefficiencies, but she never mentioned them, except to her husband, whom she told everything. He loved his work as a machinesmith, and she was envious of him for that, and she told him that, too. Frequently.

Then the governor had issued the call, and she had signed up for the Defense Force.

She was an officer, just barely, just out of training. But Valdez was good to his enlisted men, and she had found that she was good at her new job. Good enough that she fully expected to make assault sergeant immediately after their first action.

It was probably not worth it, because it meant that she stood in the first row at inspection, and that meant having to look the commissar in the eye.

Commissar Druqer was without a doubt the scariest person she had ever met, and she suspected that she was one of the few people in the division who understood just how scary he was. Druqer marched down the line, each and every stride exactly the same length, bolt pistol clenched in his fist, scrutinizing every trooper he could see.

If he found any of them wanting, for any reason at all, he could do anything to them. String them up. Have them whipped. Whip them himself. Have them shot. Shoot them himself. He could throw them out of the levy or have them shipped to the Inquisitorius Planetia cells at Fort Keltros, and there wasn’t a damned thing the lieutenant could do about it.

And he would do it. They’d all seen him do it. After the fiasco in the last week of training none of them had ever heard from Corporal Logn again.

Druqer stopped at her.

“Corporal Notte!” 

He never spoke. He barked or shouted.

“There was a discipline problem in A2 block this morning!” It was a statement of fact, and an accusation, and also a question. He wanted to know if she had an excuse.

“Yes, commissar. There was.”

“Brawling! Why was there brawling in your block, Corporal?”

“A trooper stole something of mine, commissar, and refused to give it back to me.”

“I see.” Druqer growled. “Have you disciplined this trooper?”

“Sir?”

“You were the ranking officer in your block, corporal! Theft and brawling are serious offenses and discipline was yours to enforce!”

“Sir, Lieutenant Valdez arrived shortly after the infraction and set a punishment.”

“What was the punishment?”

Eva winced inwardly. He was after Valdez, too. “Additional watch shifts, sir.”

“For theft and brawling? How many shifts?”

“One per night,” she sighed. “…for the rest of the week. Sir.”

“Lieutenant!” Druqer bellowed.

Valdez stepped over, his face stony. “Yes, commissar?”

“We have had words about this! Showing leniency to breaches of discipline is highly inappropriate for an Imperial officer! What do you have to say about this?”

“Sir.” said the lieutenant stiffly, “It was a minor incident, and Corporal Notte had the situation under control. I did not think it merited severe punishment.”

“Then your judgment needs work, Lieutenant! You are the commanding officer of this base until Lieutenant Colonel Grand arrives, and you are responsible for all these soldiers!” he indicated the four hundred and forty-one troops of the 3rd Division. “Enemy action has been reported as close as Novenus Primaris! You must be ready! All that stands between us and these heretical savages is our courage and our discipline, and that must be absolute! All infractions must be dealt with, no matter how minor!”

Druqer gestured at the assembled troops. “I expect an apology, Lieutenant.”

Valdez cleared his throat and saluted. “Sir. I apologize for my misconduct, and-”

“Not to me, lieutenant! To your men!”

Eva stiffened in disbelief. She heard something to her left that she knew was Sergeant Koth grinding his teeth. Valdez looked confused - a bad sign. He almost never showed weakness to the commissar. “To … my men, sir?”

“You are their commanding officer! It is your duty to shield them from the malices of the Archenemy, and in showing leniency you have failed them in this! A moment of laxity rewards a lifetime of heresy!”

 

“With respect, Commissar… I thought that was your job.”

Almost everyone on the parade ground held their breath.

The sharp smack split the air. Druqer’s leather-clad palm hit Valdez full in the face and the lieutenant went down. Jakob Svan actually took a step forward and Eva put a hand on his shoulder to hold him back.

“The duty of the Commissariat,” said Druqer, his voice completely unchanged, “is to enforce discipline at all levels of the Imperium’s military forces.” He stepped towards Valdez, who was being helped to his feet by the sergeant-major, who shot the commissar a filthy look.

“And it is said in the dictates of the Commissariat that those in the highest authority must always be the most closely watched, for it is within their power to do the most harm should corruption befall them. And those in the highest authority must be held to the highest standard, for upon them is placed the most responsibility. You, lieutenant,” he said, “are currently the commanding officer of Quintus Secundus. And I am the representative of the Commissariat. I have found you wanting.”

Valdez was on his feet. An ugly red mark was already forming over half of his face. “You have failed your men, lieutenant. Apologize to them at once, and do not let this happen again.”

As Valdez explained to the soldiers of the 13th Volunteers exactly how he had failed them and how he would prevent it from happening again in the future, Eva shuddered inwardly, for she understood just why Druqer scared her so much.

She had met his eyes, and she knew that he believed every word of what he had just said.

Eva touched her locket for strength. 

 

*    *    *

 

“You’re not going to like this.”

Eva raised her eyebrows at Sergeant Koth as they filed onto the training ground. “What, sir?”

Koth stepped into the marked circle and drew his training sword. “You have to punish Dov.” He angled it towards himself, making the galactically-recognized gesture for ‘bring it on.’ “And I have to punish you.”

Eva pulled out her own plastek longsword. They circled each other for a few seconds, Koth’s stance sturdy and centered, blade held out across his chest defensively. Eva held her sword out to the right, rotating it in her hand between thrusting and slicing grip, feet spread wide.

Koth made the first move, a heavy horizontal slice. “I have to give you a week of extra digging shifts. And you have to give Dov the same number.”

Eva backstepped, then sidestepped, her feet sliding over the packed earth. “Why?”

Koth‘s sword came back around and knocked her counterattack away. “Because, you were brawling, too.” He chopped down, heavy and vertical, and then stepped forward into his backswing, following Eva as she backstepped again. “And because your squad are the commissar’s new whipping boys, Corporal.”

Eva swung back at him once, twice, three times; landing hard impacts on Koth’s sword and forcing him back a step. “Our incidents are minor. Compared to Third Assault-”

Koth backed off and let Eva’s sword slide off his, then thrust forward, hard. “Corporal, you don’t get it.” Eva wasn’t there to take the hit. She was on his left side. The sergeant swung around to stop her, too late. Her foot came up and around and threw his sword out of his hand. He shook his head. “You’re damn good, though.”

“What do you mean; I don’t get it, sir?”

Koth went and picked up his weapon.

“I mean,” he said, as he settled into a combat stance again, “We’re going to be deployed soon. We’re going to be facing heretics and the higher-ups are paranoid as all holy gak.”

This time Eva moved first, making him block only twice before she twisted her grip and turned a third slice into a thrust that Koth only barely parried. “Sir, if taint was going to sprout up anywhere, it’d be Third Assault.” He spun around and slashed wide, forcing her to jump back. “That bunch of malcontents-”

“I know, Corporal!”

She came at him again, swinging lightning-fast, one, two, three, four. This time he was ready, and managed to catch her in a head-on block that jarred her arm.

He smashed his pommel into her shoulder. She kicked him in the chest and threw herself to the left, rolling away from him. “Druqer wants an execution, Notte!” Eva was tall, and her reach was as long as his. She growled as she circled Koth.  
“Then let him string up that gak Grieger from Third. He’s the one that was out behind C1-a trying to get Dov’s pants off-”

“I know, Eva!”

She was mildly surprised by the sergeant’s use of her middle name. She showed it by feinting left and then thrusting home, hard, right into his chest plate. “Kill.”

“Golden Throne, you’re fast, Corporal.”

She rubbed her bruised shoulder. “I’ll keep whipping you all day, sir, if you like.”

“I want you to run sparring today. Get one more day out of your skills before we lose you to the trenches for the next week.”

“Kyndi is going to throw a shit-fit.” Eva said.

 

*    *    *

 

“No! Dane, stop it! You’re embarrassing me!”

“Resta, enough!" Eva shouted across the sparring ground. "Go fight someone who knows how to parry!” The heavy-set woman nodded, taciturn as ever. Eva stepped into the sparring circle, drawing her own weapon.

Ornaulto Dane was a big man, his arms thick and muscled from working the loading depots. He was an obvious choice for an assault trooper. Unfortunately, he couldn’t shoot worth a damn, and Eva didn’t think he was much of a swordsman, either. She privately believed he should have been in shoved off into 6th Company as an ammo man, but she didn’t make the calls.

Not yet, anyway.

“Dane. You’re blocking too much.”

He frowned apologetically. “Corporal Notte?”

She held up her sword, horizontal and flat. “This is a block. This is what you are doing.” She lifted it, and tilted it. “This is a parry. This is what I do. This will win you a fight. Hit me.”

He swallowed. No one wanted to draw on Eva Notte.

“That’s an order, trooper.”

He swung his sword at her, a big, heavy, overhand chop. Eva caught the blade on the edge of her tilted one and then twisted it the rest of the way. Dane’s sword skidded off towards the ground. Eva’s came up and pointed at his throat.

“And another thing.” she said. “You swing overhand too much. Slice from the side. Harder to parry.”

“I’m sorry, Corporal.” he said quickly.

“Don’t be sorry. Be better. And watch your opponent’s weapon. Now look! That goes for the rest of you gaks! Especially you, Zynd!”

Most of the fighting pairs paused to watch her. “I have said this before, and I am going to say it again!” She held up her sword, and tilted it at a seventy-degree angle. “When you are blocking, you are not hitting your enemy! You can’t turn a gakking block into a strike! Parry whenever you can!” She paused. “Or don’t get hit at all and just dodge.”

Everyone chuckled.

“This is not about strength. This is about timing and perception. Strength just makes it easier.” She stepped out of the ring. “Now do it again, and parry this time! Don’t stop moving!”

 

*    *    *

 

“Good work, everyone!” said Dahlia, an hour later.

“I want to see more of that!” called Eva. “Trooper Arke!” The 1st company trooper perked up his head. “You’ve got the right idea! You block exactly when you need to, no more! And your stance is great! Everyone pay attention to Arke!” Arke grinned and saluted sharply, then followed the rest of the company out of the sparring ground.

Eva saw Kyndi shouldering her way through the press. “Trooper Dov!” Kyndi paused. “Stay a moment. I need to talk to you.” She clapped her friend on the shoulder. “See you in the trench, Dahlia.”

Kyndi stood at attention, her eyes narrowed and glaring at Eva. “Trooper Dov.” said Eva. “In light of the commissar’s demonstration of his … authoritative stance on discipline, I am increasing the punishment for theft and brawling in barracks to an additional shift working on the fortifications.” Kyndi’s pretty, pixyish face went red. She clenched her teeth.

“Note, trooper,” she said, “that I said ‘the’ punishment. Not ‘your’ punishment. I was fighting in barracks, too, and I’m going into the trench for an extra five hours, too.”

She looked confused. Eva stepped closer to her. “The commissar’s out for blood, Kyndi. He wants to execute someone before we go into combat. And it’s not going to be any of the troopers in my platoon. Even if those troopers are thieving little shits who think it’s funny to intrude on private things between myself and my husband.”

“Corporal. Permission t’ speak, corporal.”

“Go ahead.”

Kyndi swallowed. “I’m sorry, Eva. I din’t know-”

“Enough. I already broke your face for it. And I can do it again. Now let’s get to work, Dov.”

 

*    *    *

 

“The date,” grunted Jakob Svan, “is 13.8.457.M41. It is the forty-first bloody millennium. We have servitors to run factories. We have 9-track cogitators. We have ships the size of cities. We have cities the size of mountains. We have bombs that can kill whole planets!”

“So why,” he said, as he lifted the final scoop of sandy dirt into the push-barrow, “do we have to do this with picks and fecking shovels?”

“It’s because the Emperor hates you, Svan.” said Dahlia. She paused and ran a hand through her hair, wet and ropey with sweat. “And so do all His saints. You know why breakfast was so bad today? ‘Cause Ollanius Pius stepped down from Terra and pissed in it. And it’s all your fault, Svan.”

Svan was grinning reluctantly. He and Eva hoisted the barrow out of the trench. “How are we doing?” Eva asked.

“Not bad.” Dahlia replied. “Maybe two more loads. Where’s that damn tech-priest?”

Nellorie nodded. “I’ll go get him.”

She jogged off towards the next worksite. Eva and Svan jumped back into the pit. “For the record,” said Koth, “They’ve got earth-movers back at perimeter Tertius. Building real fortifications, for the inner rim. They just haven’t got here yet.”

“Right.” snorted Sergeant Dalker. “Watch ‘em get here the second we finish, say ‘great job!’ then turn around and go home.”

“No,” said Eva, as she began attacking the edge of the pit with an axe-rake, “What’ll happen is the Enemy will get here and kill us all, because we couldn’t finish this in time by hand. The next day, the movers will get here. It’ll be very tragic. Someone will write a play about it.” She slammed the axe-rake home and a huge pile of sand poured out.

“I wouldn’t mind being in a show.” chuckled Svan as he laid in with his shovel.

“You wouldn’t be in the show.” she growled. “You’d be dead. So would we.”

“Yeah,” said Dahlia, “We’d be played by troupers. Who would we all be?”

“Well,” said Koth, without a hint of irony, “Trooper Svan would be the rough Guardsman with a heart of gold who slowly falls in love with the beautiful officer. Drake Waltsmuller.”

“Oh, definitely.”

“And the female lead is Corporal Notte, of course.”

Svan blushed and attacked the pile of sand determinedly. Eva was stripped down to a singlet and heavy cargo pants, and was aware of Jakob Svan paying a good deal of attention to her when he thought she wasn’t looking.

“I think I’d want Gaea Mallarie for me.” said Eva thoughtfully.

“Her?” Resta arrived with a second barrow. “She can’t play you, Corporal. She doesn’t have an obnoxious up-stack accent.”

“She could put one on.” Eva retorted. She climbed out of the trench. “Obviously if an Imperial playwright was doing this show the lieutenant would be the villain of the piece.”

“Valdez?” gaped Svan. “Why?”

“He’d be the arrogant Guard officer who ensures through his incompetence that we don’t finish the fortifications in time. And Druqer would be the heroic commissar who fights him at every turn.”

“I don’ think I like this show no more." Kyndi grunted. "Who’d I be?”

“You’d be the character where the only thing they look for in the trouper is bosoms and arse.” said Dalker without missing a beat.

“Screw you.” Kyndi snapped.

“Any time, if you’re offering!”

Eva was somewhat glad that, at that moment, Nellorie arrived with the tech-adept and interrupted them.

“What’d you reckon?” asked Sergeant Koth, leaning on his spade. The robed adept looked at him uncomprehendingly. Koth rolled his eyes and cleared his throat. “Do you think this is clear enough to put up the next tower?”

The adept stared down into the pit. They could hear clicking as the photographic lenses that took the place of his eyes took in its exact dimensions.

“That will be sufficient. I will deliver the tower legs.”

The adept immediately strode off. “Maybe we will finish this thing by the time the enemy gets here.” Eva muttered as she took hold of the push-barrow again.

 

*    *    *

 

The adept delivered a cargo-8 spinning a cylinder of rockcrete on its back, and an enormous cargo-16 loaded with prefab parts for the watchtower and barricades. He also brought in a cohort of heavy industrial servitors, which immediately began unloading the '16.

Eva leaned against a piece of heavy plasteel next to Svan and Dahlia and splashed half a beaker of water over her face. She toweled herself off and poured the rest down her throat. She groaned. “How can it be five days from the end of autumn and still be this hot?”

“Last big heat of the year.” said Svan. “I had a letter from my uncle in Sargon City. He said the Emperor’s own snowstorm is working its way over here.”

“Maybe it’ll freeze the heretics solid and we won’t have to fight them until the summer.” Dahlia murmured.

“I think that might be what the brass are hoping for.” replied Eva, tapping her chin with the empty beaker. “If we can finish the defenses before it turns cold and the heretics dig in for the winter. By the time it thaws and the roads reopen the Guard will be here.”

“You don’t sound happy about that.” said Svan.

Eva turned away and watched Dane and the servitors lever the tower supports into the pit. “I’d rather not sit here in base all winter.”

Svan laughed, a little too hard. “We won’t get cold, corporal, not if you keep beating the hell out of us in the circle.”

Eva didn’t smile. “I came here to fight. Not to sit on my arse. I want to get it over with.”

Dahlia was silent, and covered the moment by taking a big swallow of water, and then turning away to watch the cargo-8 pour molten rockcrete into the tower’s foundation. Svan smiled and patted Eva on the shoulder, too familiarly. “Don’t worry, Eva. We’ll make the best of it.”

She pulled away. “That’s corporal to you. I’ve got six and a half hours of digging left. I’m going to get something to bloody eat.”

She joined the mob of soldiers crowding into the mess hall, thought about what to say to Svan later, and wished her letter to Holling had already gone out.

 

*    *    *

 

Lunch, thankfully, was somewhat better than breakfast. This was mostly due to the gravy, of which there was actually more than there was meat and bread. Eva sat in a corner, devoured two helpings, contemplated a third, decided against it, complimented the Munitorum cook on the gravy, slathered a thick slice of bread with it, and marched back to the worksite.

When Father Newcastle waylaid her outside E1-a with her mouth stuffed full of bread and gravy dripping down her chin, she was rather embarrassed.

“Chaplain.”

“Please, Corporal.” he said, chuckling. “Don’t stand on ceremony on my account, not when the gravy’s so good today.”

She smiled stiffly. He shook her hand. “How are you holding up, Eva?”

Her face was expressionless. “I’ll be fine. Digging makes my arms stronger.”

“I’m not talking about the punishments, though what Commissar Druqer is doing is absolutely despicable.”

Eva raised her eyebrows. “Says a holy father. You don‘t think he‘s going to ‘put the fear of the Emperor into us?’”

Newcastle scoffed. “Pfah! I see men and women come in for confession every day, and there is fear in their eyes, but it is not fear of the Emperor. But that is not what we are talking about. I asked if you were well, Evangeline.”

She sighed. “I don’t like that name, chaplain.”

“Too long to shout out in battle?”

“Something like that.”

“How about Scaea, then? That’s nice and short.”

She rounded on him. “Where did you-”

“I’m in charge of censoring letters, corporal. I was a mite surprised to see you writing again. What sort of name is ’Scaea’? It’s not Sargonan, is it?”

“That is none of your business. And no one calls me that. Not even you, chaplain.” She was taller than him by a good few inches. Her eyes were burning with anger. She wished she had her wargear.

The priest smiled.

“What the gak is so funny?” she snarled.

“You have such fury. I must admit, I would not want to be in the shoes of the heretics, facing you across a battlefield.”

“Funny, chaplain. Very funny.”

“I am quite serious, Eva. This is the Emperor’s work, and I think you will perform it with valor and skill.”

She turned away. “Excuse me, chaplain.” she gestured at the latrines. “I need to go 'do the Emperor’s work' before I get back to digging.”

“I’m always here if you want to talk, Eva!” He called as she stormed off.

  
*    *    *

 

Fifty troopers from 2nd Assault Company filed onto the perimeter as Eva walked back to the worksite. Kyndi was sitting on the edge of one of the newly dug pits, dangling her feet and looking determinedly at the ground. A few officers called out to Eva, but she just nodded tersely at them and sat down next to Kyndi.

“Did you eat, Dov? Lunch was good today.”

“Aye.”

“Going to have to get the recipe for that gravy.”

Kyndi laughed bitterly. “Bet the cook just knocked over a box o’ something’ inta the mix an’ served it up.”

Eva smiled briefly, but it faded, and they lapsed into an awkward silence. The two soldiers sat, momentarily insulated from the rest of the world, oblivious to the shouts and tramping boots and industrial clatter surrounding them. They sat in their bubble together, and had no idea what to say to one another.

Kyndi spoke first. “Corporal. I am going t’ bloody burst if I don’t ask.”

“Ask what, Dov?”

Kyndi shook her head in confusion. Her long brown hair was already starting to grow out of her Guard haircut.

“Y’ don’t like me. Gak it, y’ bloody hate me. I see th’ way you look at me.” She turned, and looked seriously at Eva. “So why’d you do this? Why’d you go on the grinder with me here?”

 _Because I was ordered to_ , Eva thought, but that wasn’t the point. She was beginning to understand why Koth had done this.

“Because no matter what I think of her, I’m not going to let anything happen to a soldier under my command.” Kyndi raised an eyebrow. “You can’t take anything bloody seriously, Dov. And you need a few goddamn boundaries. But you’re a gak of a good swordswoman, so far. And you can shoot, which is more than I can say for some.”

Kyndi looked genuinely touched.

“And besides,” said Eva, “haven’t you been hearing the mill? The heretics are coming. We’re going to be in combat together sooner or later. If I can dig with you, I can fight with you.” She offered Kyndi her hand.

They clasped hands for a moment, and then the whistle blew for work. As they got up and fell into line with the 2nd Assault men, Kyndi made an awkward, unreadable face, and said, “Thank you.”

Eva fingered the chain at her neck. “Don’t thank me, trooper.“ she said, quietly. “Thank my husband.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> No Space Marines here. Not even anything you'd recognize as codex for a long, long while. Please don't let it turn you off, the entire first act is written, about five chapters, and it gets a whole lot grimmer and darker from here. I'll be posting as I format them.
> 
> Thanks to snugglepup, who got me to finish editing this and start working on it again.


	3. Act I, Chapter Two: Diamond Eyes

**7.00 Terran (sidereal)**  
 **Planet Adobe**  
 **Forward Outpost Quintus Secundus**  
 **13th Volunteers, St. Michel, 3rd Division**  
 **1st Assault Company, 2nd Platoon**  
 **Day 6 of deployment**  
  
  
Eva remembered none of her dreams that night.

When she woke up her muscles ached from the previous day’s digging. It felt good. The ache of sword practice, the ache of penance done and muscle memory built, had long since ceased to bother her, and so she relished the exhaustion of digging and lifting.

She woke up, and immediately scowled.

She was going to have to deal with Svan.

 

Her mood improved slightly as the morning went on. Parade was an extraordinarily relaxed affair, as for some reason neither Druqer or Valdez were present, and it consisted of the sergeant-major walking up and down the ranks once and putting them through a handful of weapon drills. Then he immediately dismissed them to mess and rushed off, a great deal seemingly on his mind.

She and Dahlia took off their armor and went to the morning mess. There were troopers everywhere, eating, talking, waiting in line. None of them were Jakob Svan.

They collected their breakfast - scoops of hot mash with some sugar mixed in. The caffeine was the only thing that made it bearable. Eva wrinkled her nose. “What the hell is this, mill sugar?”

“The blessed and hallowed Munitorum apologizes, Corporal Notte.” said Dahlia, putting on the flat, toneless voice of a Munitorum menial. “We will immediately ship some hive-powdered sweetener directly from South Sargonia to more effectively satisfy your poncy-ass up-stack tastes.”

Trooper duVallick, stepping away from the counter behind them, snorted furiously with laughter and slopped half his breakfast onto the floor. He blushed and tried to clean it up. Eva chuckled. No one ever stopped making fun of her well-to-do way of speech, even though almost a year of living with soldiers had all but erased it from her manner. Eva didn't mind. It was still funny.

A few troopers hailed them on the way through the mess. Pya saluted briefly. “Good sunrise, Corporal.”

Eva nodded. “You girls enjoy your full night of sleep?”

They smiled guiltily. “Very much, ma’am. Who’d you think’s in the lander?”

Eva raised her eyebrows. “Lander?”

Pya and Sergeant Dalker exchanged glances. “You didn’t hear?”

Eva shook her head. She glanced at Dahlia, who looked embarrassed. “It woke the rest of us up. I assumed you heard it too.”

“A Valkyrie from St. Michel touched down in the middle of the night.” said Dalker, leaning back in his chair and folding his arms. “Landed on top of the depot and dropped off about twenty people, according to someone I know in the depot staff.”

Pya nodded seriously. “No one has come out since daybreak, so no one is sure who it was.”

Dalker smirked. “Any bets?”

“Maybe it’s a new commissar.” grinned Arke. They all laughed.

Quietly.

“We’d make room for you, but…” Their table was the closest one to the mess counter and always filled up nigh-instantly.

Eva shook her head. “Don’t worry about it. We’ll find places. See you all at sparring.”

Dalker groaned. “I’ll take that as a threat.”

Eva smiled wickedly. “Keep up that attitude, Sergeant, and I’ll have your job before long."

Her good humor did not last. There was a trooper sitting at the first table they picked, a trooper with a stalk of worrywheat sticking out of his mouth and a wide smile that did not extend to his eyes. He raised a hand. “Corporal. Could I talk to you, please?”

“Oh, Throne.” muttered Dahlia.

Eva glared at the man. “About what?” she said loudly. “Want me to help you with some smuggling, Grieger?”

He frowned. His cronies sat on either side of him - Daykis, the best swordsman in 3rd Assault, and Kjata, the skinny shotgun girl with the tattoos and the non-regulation haircut.

“No need to say things like that, corporal. I just want to talk about my girl.”

Dahlia clenched her teeth. Eva stepped forward. “Don’t you pissing start, Grieger. I do not want to hear another word about it.”

“You’ve been awful rough on her.” he said, as if she hadn’t spoken. Grieger’s immaculate diction clashed sharply with his voice - a rough, low voice, the voice of someone who had breathed the fumes in the undercity. “Where I come from, corporal, men don’t let people do things like that to their girls.”

Eva slammed her tray down on the table and stepped over to Grieger. She didn’t bend down. She stood over him. Jans Grieger was not a tall man, and Eva Notte was a tall woman.

“You listen to me, _trooper_. Kyndi Dov is not ‘your girl’. She does not want to be ‘your girl.’ And if you ever lay a single finger on her again, I swear by the God-Emperor and all His saints that I will throw you to the commissar and never look back.”

“He’s got nothing on me.” protested Grieger.

Now she did bend down. “You think that maniac needs a gakking reason, Jans? I’m an officer and you’re a dreg with a marshals' record. I’ll have all three of you strung up, you hear me?”

Daykis swung his leg over the seat and got up, clenching and unclenching his fists. Eva tensed. Surely they weren’t stupid enough to try anything here in the mess. There were PDF personnel everywhere. There were officers present.

“What are you doing, ganger?” someone growled behind Daykis.

_Oh, gak._

Jakob Svan was standing in the aisle. He was wearing his flak vest and cap-badge and his fists were clenched. The big swordsman turned to face him. “I am not a ganger.” he growled.

“No, but the gak who holds your leash is.”

She tried to step in. “Svan-”

“Are these swine giving you trouble, corporal?”

The mess hall had gotten much quieter. Most of the surrounding tables had paused to watch the confrontation. “Nothing I can’t handle, trooper.” she said quickly. She could see at least one sergeant working his way towards the table.

Svan shot a filthy look at Grieger. “You sure? I know these three actually fight pretty well for gang-meat slaughtstains."

“You better stop that shit, son.” said Grieger, all trace of politeness gone from his voice.

“Svan. That’s enough.” she snapped, glaring at him as viciously as she had Grieger.

All the fight drained out of him in an instant. “Of course. Corporal.” He saluted, quickly and halfheartedly.

Eva turned back to the three malcontents. “I don’t want to hear another word about this. We have bigger gakking problems, Grieger.”

She stormed away from his table, beckoning for Svan to follow her. Dahlia trudged after them, shaking her head.  “I swear to Terra if my breakfast is cold after that, I’m going to go punch him in the throat.” she muttered.

They sat down at the other end of the mess. Sergeant Koth was sitting at the top of the table, talking quietly to one of the Munitorum chiefs. Eva slammed her tray down, slopping sugared mash onto the table. “He’s a menace.” she growled. “I should just go to the commissar and make some shit up. Get rid of him. I _refuse_ to be harassed by some pissing delusional understreet gang-boss _gak-head-_ ” She shook her head and shoved a spoonful of mash into her mouth. “Ugh.”

“He’s swine, Eva. Don’t worry about him.” said Svan, in what he thought was a reassuring tone.

“Svan.” she said stiffly. “I’d prefer you called me ‘Corporal Notte’. Or just ‘Corporal.’

He faltered. “I - I didn’t mean-”

“I know.”

She sighed and put down her spoon. The mash was awful anyway. “Look, Svan. I’m sorry. I really am. But this has to stop. All this whiteknighting, trying to impress me, it’s not on. I’ve got a husband and I’m your officer.”

“You’re married? But -“ he swallowed. “You’re not a conscript – why-”

She shrugged and smiled, sadly. “I needed the money, is all.”

He looked away from her, staring down into his bowl as though his whole world had just been torn out from under him. She felt slightly guilty.

“Look. You want to impress me?” He glanced back at her. “Be a good soldier. I need people I can rely on, especially now. You understand, Svan?”

He nodded, slowly.

Dahlia dropped her spoon into her metal bowl with a clatter. “I’m done. Going to get ready for sparring.” She excused herself, faster than was probably polite. Eva knew this was making everyone uncomfortable. She watched Dahlia hurry to the mess hall exit.

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Daykis, sitting a table over with Grieger, watching her leave as well, an animal glint in his eye.

 _They need to be dealt with_. She thought again.

  
*     *     *

 

Koth’s sword came in at her overhand and left. She turned the sidestep that took her out of his path into a twirl, spinning her sword over her head and then directly down, ducking under Dalker’s slicing blade and sweeping his feet out from under him. He hit the ground hard, but before she could claim the kill, Twykrol lunged in at her. She twisted forward and the sword scarred her right shoulder plate. She kept moving, diving into a forward roll that took her away from the three sergeants.

As she landed she was already spinning to face the dour, professional sergeant of 3rd Assault, who was chasing after her, sword held in a two-handed grip, slamming down on her head. She didn’t block. She parried. Blocking a strike from Boritz Twykrol head-on would leave you with a broken arm. He was a strong, brutal man – his faith in the Emperor was strong and his fighting style was brutal. That was the kind of man it took to keep control of 3rd Assault Company.

Grieger and his cronies were watching. Eva thought about taking a fall to Twykrol. Better they were afraid of him than her.

Then his second strike almost tore her sword out of her hand. She saw Koth circling wide left to flank her. She was totally occupied with Twykrol, and Koth was on her vulnerable side.

So she rolled right and backwards away from Twykrol’s next blow, got her pistol out of its holster, and squeezed the trigger three times. It fizzled harmless low-pulse las-rounds, leaving light scorch marks on his chest plating. “Kill!” she shouted. The watching troopers gasped and cheered.

She threw herself at Koth, hitting him twice, three, four, five times. His defense was fantastic. She kept her grip loose, ready to react to his parries, ready to switch grips at a moment’s notice if a hole in his guard opened up.

She couldn’t see Dalker. She was as good as Koth and better than Dalker, but he could still kill her with a single blow if she couldn’t see him. She backstepped, and sidestepped. Eva actually heard Koth swear as she moved. No one could move like she could.

He came after her, making vertical and horizontal chops, short moves that were easy to pull out of, but she had already turned.

Just in time to see Dalker aiming his own pistol at her.

She did have to admit that it felt like cheating.

She abandoned her duel with Koth and hurled herself at 2nd Assault’s sergeant, placing herself between him and Koth. She saw Dalker’s eyes widen, and she went into a roll as he pulled the trigger.

The low-pulse shot went over her head and hit Koth, and he stiffened in surprise. Eva came out of the roll and lunged her sword into Dalker’s stomach. “Kill!” she cried.

She turned around. Koth was holding his sword in his left hand, allowing his right to dangle uselessly. “Limb kill.” he said quietly.

She attacked, and he raised his guard to defend himself, but it only took her four blows to hit him in the neck. “Kill.”

The watching troopers burst into cheers and shouts. Koth folded his arms and smiled gruffly. Dalker swore and stomped out of the circle. Twykrol shook Eva’s hand vigorously. “Good fight, corporal, good fight. You keep that up and you’ll have a stripe in no time at all.” He pointed after the retreating Dalker. "Poor show, that."

Dahlia stepped up and smacked her fist against Eva’s, laughing. “All three at once! That was fantastic! I wish I had picts of that!”

Resta chuckled next to her. “I’ve got a war story already and we haven’t even been in combat yet.”

“No kidding!“ Lieutenant Valdez stepped into the circle and clapped her on the back. “That was amazing, corporal. I only caught the end of it but it was amazing. That maneuver with Georg’s pistol…”

“Only way I was going to bring my sergeant down without getting killed, sir.”

“I’m sure.” he bent down. “I wish I could say it was going to get you out of trench duty, but…”

She shook her head. “No, sir. If my platoon is digging, I dig too. Two, maybe three more days and we’ll have this place secure.”

“Well said, corporal.”

The lieutenant nodded. Dahlia and the others saluted the officers. “We’ll see you on the field, Eva.”

They made for the exit. “We’d better get in there too, corporal.” said Koth.

“Lieutenant…” Eva knew that if she didn’t do this now she might not get another chance. “Could I have a moment to talk? Sir?”

Valdez glanced at Koth. “Sergeant?”

“Of course, Notte. I’ll see you in a few minutes.”

“Lieutenant.” she said as Koth strode off.

“Tell you what, Notte. I need to go to the requisition desk. Something for our new … guests.” he grimaced. “Why don’t you come with me, get your armor fixed, and we can talk. Sergeant Twykrol did a number on your shoulder.”

She fell into step next to him. “Guests?”

“They got here last night.” He looked disgruntled.

“That shuttle everyone keeps talking about.” she realized. “Who are they?”

He pursed his lips. “If you get any clues, tell me. They’re secret ops of some sort, from Fort Keltros.”

Eva stared. “The Inquisi-”

“I don’t know and I’m not going to ask. All I know is that their commander has a colonel’s credentials and whatever he’s doing is so far above my pay grade it’s not even funny.”

He shook his head abruptly. “But that’s not your problem. You wanted to talk to me, corporal.”

“Sir.” she swallowed. “I just wanted to apologize for what happened on the parade ground yesterday. It was because of me.”

He took a deep breath. “It … wasn’t your fault, Notte. The commissar wanted to put someone over the coals. It just ended up being you. You didn‘t do anything wrong.”

“Still, sir. You are a good commander. We are lucky to have you. I made you look bad in front of the commissar, and I am sorry for that.”

Valdez stopped walking outside the depot entrance. “Corporal Notte. I am sure that the commissar would not be particularly happy with me telling you this.”

“Sir?”

“We are incredibly lucky to have you, corporal. You are one of my best officers, Eva. I need people I can rely on, and I am sure that I can rely on you when the shooting starts. I just want you to know that.”

Eva swallowed, hard. “Thank you. Sir.”

He smiled tiredly at her. She realized just how much pressure the lieutenant was under. “So I don’t want you apologizing to me, alright, corporal?”

“Unless I gak up horribly, sir?” He laughed. His laugh made you want to drop what you were doing and ask what was so funny.

“Unless you gak up horribly, yes. Now come on, let’s get these orders in.”

  
* * *

  
The lieutenant ordered her a spare pauldron and set about requisitioning the wide variety of supplies the secret ops had asked for. Eva saluted him and left the depot, just in time to realize that she hadn’t asked if letters had gone out yet. She cursed. She didn’t want to pester him.

She would have to ask Father Newcastle. She made a note to go to the chapel after her first shift in the trenches. She really, really didn’t want to give the old man the satisfaction, but there was nothing for it.

She wanted to get back to digging. She wanted the fortifications finished.

The troops were ready - as ready as they could be. At least the assault troopers were. She and Koth and Twykrol had done all they could to prepare them. She hadn't watched the riflemen or the heavy gunners drill for a few days, but she knew they were good.

Maybe not Guard good, but pretty damned good.

They just needed walls to fight from. The towers, she knew, were up, and had heavy weapons emplaced in them already. The tech-priests had started towing in big plas-crete prefabs topped with battlements and firing slits to wall off the base. Once they were completed they could seal the base completely, and kill anything outside with rifles and heavy stubber fire.

She just wanted to see _action_.

She was a good swordswoman. She knew that - she’d beaten Koth, Twykrol, and Dalker all at the same time. She was probably the best assault specialist in the company, if not the division.

She was better at it than anything she’d ever done, but there was something missing.

She was deeply envious of Resta. She had been an arbitrator before she joined the militia (and had been heard to remark that she preferred the shock-maul to the longsword.) and had fought gangers and heretics in open combat. There was something different about her. She had that incomprehensible _something_ that Eva lacked. Sergeant Yannic had it too, and the lieutenant, and her assault driller, all of them had done time on the border before the current mass mobilization.

Eva wanted to fight. To _really_ fight. To see what everything that she had learned actually meant on a battlefield. She wanted to know what would happen when she was able to use a real sword, instead of a piece of weighted plastek, and actually land a blow instead of stopping short and saying ‘kill’.

It occurred to her that she shouldn't put any of that in a letter. Especially not to Holling.

The man came out from behind the mess hall and stood directly in her path.

He was tall, easily six feet, and wore a sleek armored bodyglove that made obvious a tight, muscled physique. A bronze aquila was pinned at his throat. He had an enormous holster buckled on his shoulder. He was wearing a vox earpiece.

And instead of eyes, he had glittering diamonds.

They scrutinized her. They weren’t diamonds, she realized. They were the most sophisticated augmetics she had ever seen. She felt like she was being viewed through a targeter.

This was very likely the secret ops colonel. Eva quickly saluted. “Excuse me, sir.” she made to step around him.

“You’re Eva Notte.” he said.

She stopped.

 _Why do you know that?_ She thought.

“Yes, sir.” she said.

“Everyone’s talking about you.” His voice was ragged and forceful. A man who always got what he wanted, especially when what he wanted was liquor and lho-sticks. “Apparently you gave the officers quite a schooling earlier.”

“My assault sergeant bet I could do it, sir. I wanted to see if I could.”

“Make him some money, did you?”

“I expect so, sir.”

“Get in on the action yourself, at all, corporal?”

“No, sir. I don’t gamble.”

“Mark of a wise and boring person.” Diamond-Eyes said. His face remained expressionless. It was scarred directly across, from one side of the head to the other, across the eyes.

“So you beat all three? Including the 3rd sergeant. I hear he’s a real bastard.”

“He is, sir. He hits like a cargo-eight.”

“And you won.”

“Sir?" she said with some annoyance. "I have a labor shift.” She didn’t have time for this.

“Ever think you should be in charge? If you’re that good?”

She shrugged impatiently. “Sometimes.”

“Yeah?”

“I usually run close-combat practice. I’ll get promoted. You watch.”

“I will watch.” he said. His glittering eyes clicked at her.

“Sir, if you don’t mind…”

“Why do you keep calling me ‘sir‘?” asked Diamond-Eyes, without any real interest.

Eva stared at him.

“I’m not PDF. I’m not wearing any insignia.”

“I - I assumed…”

He regarded her for a moment more, then waved a hand dismissively. “Don’t let me keep you, corporal. Clearing sweep today. Armed guard. That should be fun.”

“Don’t remind me.”

He waved again. “Places to be. People to meet.”

She turned and left, hurrying away between the Munitorum barracks, walking a bit faster than usual towards the western perimeter. She spared a look back. Diamond-Eyes was greeting two people; a trooper in a suit of heavy black carapace armor, and a short person in a long red coat and some kind of blue headgear. The figure was grabbing Diamond-Eyes by the hand and saying something in a low voice, and as she watched, he turned and fixed his gleaming targeters on her again. This time his mild expression was gone, and he was glaring with undisguised suspicion.

She had no idea what it meant, and had absolutely no desire to find out, and she picked up the pace and hurried towards the work site.


	4. Act I, Chapter Three: Blood

There were only 2nd Assault troopers in the trench when she arrived at the perimeter. There were some fifty men and women outside the perimeter gathered around two Munitorum cargo-8s. Most were from Eva’s company, but there were fifteen or so 4th Company riflemen. Sergeant Yannic waved her over. “Notte! Where the gak have you been?”

“I had to talk to the lieutenant.” she replied. “And then one of these secret ops gaks wanted to play ask-and-tell with me.”

Yannic grimaced and shook her head. “Sorry about that. We’ll just have to work fifteen minutes harder!” she shouted. About half the troops cheered. The other half groaned.

She banged twice on the cab of the first 8. “Move it out!”

Dahlia was sitting in the back of one of the trucks, was holding her sword across her lap. “What happened with the secret ops?” she asked, immediately.

“Gak if I know.” Eva growled. “Asked me a load of questions and then glared at me. The sooner they do what they’re here to do and leave, the better.”

Resta stepped up alongside them, shotgun slung on her shoulder. “They might be representatives of the Holy Inquisition.” she said. “We’ve got no right to hurry them along. However long it takes, it takes.”

“You sure you joined the PDF, trooper?” grunted Aerin duVray. “’cause you still sound like a 'bite to me.”

“I’ll take that as a compliment.” said Resta without looking at him. He shook his head, chuckling.

“Halt!” yelled Yannic. “4th! Perimeter!” The 4th riflemen began to fan out around the clearing zone in a wide fireteam spread, scanning the horizon and the rolling hills for movement.

“Okay, people, you should know how to do this by now! Spread out, search around, anything higher than your knees, you put in the truck! If you can take cover behind it yourself, it goes in the truck! If you can’t move it, you break it, and it goes in the truck! If you can’t break it, you mark it red! Now see here!” She held up a small metal beaker with a spray-nozzle attached. “There is plains grass growing here! It grows tall! It can be hidden in! It needs to go! Pull it up, and?”

“It goes in the truck!” chorused the troopers.

“Those are my boys and girls! Now!” She shook the spray-beaker. “This is something totally unpronounceable by anyone who isn’t a magos, and if any of you were magi you wouldn’t be here, putting rocks in a truck! All you need to know is that when you spray it on something, that something is never going to grow again! That includes you! When you pull up plains grass, you spray this on the roots! Arvien! Arke! DuPris! Mendez! Notte! Vezer! You get to handle this hideously toxic substance! Step right up, don’t be shy!”

In the event of an attack on Quintus Secundus, PDF doctrine called for all base personnel to withdraw inside the walls and assume a ‘siege’ stance. The purpose of the clearing sweep was to create an exclusion zone surrounding Quintus Secundus - a totally flat area of ground devoid of any cover that could be used by enemy fighters attacking the base, so that the troopers on the walls would enjoy total fire superiority. It was uncertain how long the campaign would last (Eva reflected on this with a grimace) so doctrine called for the killzones to be cleared and stay cleared.

So they tore up the ground with axe-rakes and piled the ropey stalks of grass in the trucks and sprayed poison on the roots. Long after the fighting was over, nothing would ever grow here again.

It was not stimulating work. A few yards away Dane and Svan were watching as a tech-priest cut a heavy stone in half with a melta-torch. It cracked in half, glowing hot, and the adept warned them away from hefting the broken pieces into the 8 until they had cooled.

She sighed, and kept digging.

It was harder work than it looked - hard, and complicated enough to be irritating instead of exercise. The plains grass was used to surviving Adobe winters, which many would argue were much more formidable than irritated militiamen. Imperial Planetary Defense Force outposts were not armed with gardening equipment (not even in wartime). 

Eva started winding spools of the grass around her spade-edge before wrenching it out of the ground and going for the poison spray. Sometimes they found particularly stubborn patches with extra-deep roots that required both her and Dahlia holding onto one rake to pull free.

“She’s got the right idea.” Dahlia was pointing at Kyndi, a few patches away, She had drawn her sword and was just slicing through the stalks, while Arke stood back with the spray and watched bemusedly.

For some reason, this filled Eva with disgust.

As Dahlia went to pull out her own weapon she put her hand over the younger woman’s. “Don’t.”

She blinked. “What? Why not?”

“It’s … not right.”

Dahlia raised an eyebrow.

“These are for war.” Eva said. “Not … gardening work.” And she got up and strode towards Kyndi.

“Dov!”

She turned around. “Corp'ral?”

“Sheathe that.” she pointed at the sword. “Use the rake, or ask someone if you need help.”

Kyndi stared. “Why?! It gets the job done three times as fast-”

“It’s a weapon of war, trooper, not a shovel. Sheathe it.”

Kyndi was shaking with uncomprehending anger.

“Trooper Dov. This is not a big deal. But I can make it one. Sheathe the sword and keep working.”

Arke quietly stepped forward and hacked into the ground. Eva turned away and contemplated the fact that she might have just destroyed her newfound accord with Kyndi, and then Yannic’s sharpshooter called out.

“Sergeant!”

Yannic turned. “Vaughn?”

“Is this what I think it is, ma‘am?” She jogged over to the marksman, who was peering through his scope at the crest of the next hill. She held up a pair of magnoculars. Eva squinted in the direction they were scrutinizing. Come to think of it, it _did_ look like something was moving…

“Shit.” gasped Yannic. “Oh, sweet Holy gakking Throne - Five Two, this is clearing sweep!” she babbled into her earpiece. “Come in Five Two, for the grace of the Throne-” She paused as someone answered.

Eva stepped up to the other rifleman, Vaughn. “What is it?”

He was staring through the scope as if hypnotized. “Heretics.” he whispered. “Dozens of ‘em.”

 

*     *     *

 

A feverish stream of ‘yes sir’s and two ‘yes, commissar’s issued from Yannic’s mouth, and she began shouting orders.

“3rd Division! Enemy contact! I repeat, we have live enemy contact coming into the valley! Drivers!” she shouted at the Munitorum crews. “Pull your vehicles up to the slope edge and make a barricade! 4th!” she addressed her own riflemen. “Weapons to three-fourths power! Get in the trucks!” 1st!” she called to Eva and her gathering troopers. “Cover on the edge of the slope! Stay out of sight and charge downhill when I give the signal!”

And just like that it was happening.

“We’re fighting here?!” Nellorie squealed. “Not back at the base?”

“The defenses aren’t finished.” said duVray, ushering riflemen into the trucks as they moved into position. “We’ve got orders to keep them away from the base.”

“We just have to hold them here!” called Yannic as she listened to her vox. “Valdez is sending a hundred more troopers out after us, we just have to do this for a few minutes!”

As the thirty assaults formed up around the trucks Eva realized two things.

First, she was effectively the ranking assault specialist. Sergeant Koth had not been scheduled for manual labor. The only other assault officer was Corporal duPris, a passable swordsman who had been promoted mostly for organizational skill, and who was very clearly looking to her for authority.

Second, she was not afraid.

“A squad. Go right with me. B squad, go left with Corporal duPris. Vezer, Zynd, you’re with B squad. Krier, Selwyn, Khailevich, go with A.”

They snapped to her orders. She drew her laspistol and sword, and her nerves thrilled at the keening it made as it came out of the sheath.

She could hear Resta praying. St. Michel, Warriors 3:14.

“ _The Archenemy stands at my doorstep_  
 _and his shadow is long,_  
 _God-Emperor, I beseech You,_  
 _take my faults, my weakness, my frailty, my false judgments…_ ”

“One hundred meters!” yelled the marksman. His long-lasrifle screamed down the hill.

_“Make my faults perfections, my weakness strength,_   
_my frailty fortitude, my false judgments true…”_

The tech-adept stepped up to Eva. “Corporal.” he said. She was surprised to hear an ordinary human voice rather than a voxponder. “I am combat capable. Where do you wish me?”

She blinked. “What can you do?”

His two mechadendrites coiled and whipped; his gripping clamp made a pneumatic fist and his diamond-edged power saw revved like a chainsword. His original, human arms emerged from beneath his robes, gripping a heavy Mars-pattern lascarbine.

“Go left with B squad.”

The adept obeyed. Eva shook her head. She had just given a combat order to an enginseer of the Cult Mechanicus. No manufactorum manager would ever do anything like that.

_“As You raise Your blade in anger,_   
_so too do I raise mine,_   
_and let mine descend upon the Archenemy of Mankind and strike,_   
_with Thy destructive might…”_

She could hear deep, throaty roars and screams from down the hill.

“Fifty meters!” yelled Vaughn.

“FOR THE EMPEROR!” Yannic shrilled. “FIRE!”

Fifteen high-powered lasrifles began to crack like electrified whips. Beams of ice-blue laser light surged from the barrels of the 4th’s weapons. There were cries of pain from below. The air shook with ionization and crackling after-shock energy.

“Twenty-five meters!”

The Assaults had not been fully equipped for combat. They had their armored leggings and their flak vests, as well as their weapons, but they were not wearing their full suits of armored battle-plate and flak netting.

They would have to make do. “Twenty meters!” The riflemen were shooting faster now. The enginseer on the other side of the 8s yelled “Omnissiah, may our shots ring true!!” and mixed a series of blue-white beams and higher, thinner, faster las-cracks like a badly tuned vox into the deadly salvo.

“Fifteen!”

“ _…and when once I raised, as you raise,_  
 _a ploughshare, now I raise, as you raise,_  
 _a sword, and I pray to thee, my Emperor,_  
 _to shield me, that I may one day lay down my arms_  
 _and take up a ploughshare again…_ ”

“Ten!” roared Yannic. “1st! Go! Go! Go!”

“Pistols!” Eva yelled as they rose to address. She sighted down the barrel of the handgun gripped in her outstretched fist. A figure moved in her sights, and in the time it took to release a breath, she saw it.

It was a tall woman, with long scraggly black hair bound up in a topknot. She had no helmet. She had no flak vest, and no ammo webbing or flak net. She had only a breastplate of thick boiled leather, and ragged, filthy leather pants and boots. She was holding an enormous broadsword above her head, and clutching a tarnished shield of black iron close to her torso.

Eva stepped down the hill and met the woman’s eyes, and saw the madness in them.

She pulled the trigger.

“ ** _And let Thy Light shine in the darkness of the foe,_**  
 ** _for the Archenemy of Mankind is terrible,_**  
 ** _but he is NOTHING to the God-Emperor of Mankind!!_** ”

The sound of the pistol shot warred with Resta’s shouted prayers. The wild-eyed woman took the full-power las-round right in the throat. She stumbled.

And kept going. Her charge only faltered by one or two steps. She kept coming, and held up her sword to cut Eva in half.

Eva brought up her own weapon and stepped into the blow, interrupting the heretic’s swing and catching the sword at its high point. She drove her armored knee into her midsection and the heretic staggered back down the hill.

Somewhere off to her right Resta’s shotgun boomed and a screaming madman’s war cry was cut short. Eva leapt down the slope after her opponent, putting the downward momentum into her thrust, her deadliest move.

The woman knocked the blow away as though it was nothing, but her weapon was big and heavy, and Eva’s was thin and wieldy, and while she was still coming out of her backswing Eva had recovered and taken her sword in both hands.

She made it an underhand swing, another interception, but instead of pre-empting the sword, Eva hacked through the arm holding it.

She felt it break skin. She felt the resistance as it hit thick, corded muscle tissue. She felt it touch bone, and she kept swinging.

The heretic’s arm came off, almost at the shoulder but not quite. The broadsword bounced away. The destroyed upper arm spurted blood. Even as the heretic was screaming in pain and anger Eva was bringing her sword around and down. She sliced off the woman’s ear before her blade went down through her unguarded throat and plunged into the meat of her body.

She cut through organs and muscles and ribs. It was more difficult than anything she had ever cut before. This woman’s body was tougher than Imperial flak armor. Her arms were burning, and her soul was _singing_.

Eva tore her weapon out of her opponent’s stomach. Blood spattered onto the dust and over Eva’s legs. She brought up her right foot, marveling at the pattern the madwoman’s blood made on her leggings’ gray camouflage, and kicked her twitching body down the hill.

It smashed into the dust, and then people were fighting and dying all around her.

There were dozens of them, at least thirty, and there had been many more, but they lay dead and dying on the dusty slope, punctured and blown apart by las-rifle fire. They were huge, massively muscled brutes and tough, heavy-set women. They wore plates of metal or leather armor, and chainmail sleeves or vests, or mismatched pauldrons, or horned helmets, or a hundred other pieces of scavenged protection cobbled into suits of armor. They brandished swords and axes and spiked maces and long knives. At the forefront was a towering bull of a man, at least seven feet in height, taller even than Dane, who smashed Vaultersson to the ground with his first blow.

DuPris screamed, his sword lodged in a hulking heretic monster’s gut, and fell to the ground, blasting the huge man over and over again with his pistol, until a full-power pulse from Vaughn incinerated his head.

Dahlia cried out in pain as a heretic with a rusty old solid-ammo pistol shot her in the chest. Her flak vest took the bullet and she shot him back three times.

Svan roared as a heavy-set brute with a spiked hammer and a cackling, split-faced female with two deadly serrated knives drove him back. His arms were bleeding; the knives kept slipping through his guard. He hacked a bloody trench through the huge man’s chest.

Nellorie went down, her left arm severed, spilling blood on the ground. The towering berserker raised his axe to finish her off.

Eva lunged, dodging past Arke. She leveled her pistol at more shrieking heretics that had not yet come to grips with the militiamen and she fired, one, two, three, four times, on full power.

Three heretics went down. She was sure that at least one of them was dead, but she saved the last three shots in the pack for Nellorie’s would-be killer. The first squeeze of the trigger bored a hole in his iron chest plating. The second obliterated his face. The third destroyed his weapon arm and brought him crashing to the ground on top of the fallen assault.

Eva ducked under a swinging blade and pushed the gigantic man off of Nellorie before he crushed her. He was truly gargantuan. She was sure his muscles were swollen with the foul power of witchery.

She heard the hellish warcry first. “ **BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD!!!** ” the berserker behind her screamed, and swung a greatsword at her head. She didn’t even try to block it. She twisted to the side and let the blade go past her. The pistol fell from her hand. She had no time to reload. She didn’t need it. And it was nothing compared to cutting through flesh and bone with her blade.

Less than nothing.

She swung underhand again, but her sword skidded off the man’s chainmail, and he recovered faster than the woman had. “ **SKULLS FOR THE SKULL THRONE!!** ” He swung the greatsword at her again. She backstepped just in time, and heard the blade whistle past her face.

Sweet Holy Throne of Terra, she felt _alive_.

She brought her sword back and gripped it in both hands. She was going to need to thrust to get through that mail. And she was still standing uphill.

She was standing directly over Nellorie’s body now. The woman was still alive. Eva was sure of it. She couldn’t abandon her. That also meant she couldn’t backstep, so there went her first tactic for killing the berserker.

 _Plan Secundus, then_.

He slashed. He only slashed horizontally. It was a good habit. She would have commended this heretic in sparring practice. It was making it almost impossible for her to parry.

But it also meant she didn’t have to worry about him hitting Nellorie by accident.

She saw him winding up to slash left-to-right, so she hurled herself to the left as fast as possible. The blade’s angle was wrong. It missed completely. She saw him trying to break out of his own momentum.

She sprung off on her right heel and rammed the sword through his collarbone. She couldn’t hear the bones in his neck and chest crack, but she could _feel_ the impacts go up her arms. She heard a scream of triumph leaving her lips as she ripped the blade out through his throat.

The man collapsed, twitching, and Eva stepped back. She bent and scooped up Nellorie in her arms. “ _Yannic!_ ” she shouted at the rifle sergeant. “ _Cover me!!_ ”

She began to back towards the cargo-8s. Like wolves scenting weakness the berserkers peeled off and came after her and her wounded comrade.

One stumbled as a blue-white beam punched through his side, and then went down on his face as a second shot vaporized his groin. The rifleman crowed. A screaming woman pointed a revolver at them, and a flurry of las-shots from the enginseer’s distinctive carbine perforated her. Then the tech-priest himself was there, and his clamp-fist struck out like a snake and collapsed her skull, smashing her onto her back. “Go!” he yelled, his gun crackling and his dendrites whipping back and forth, driving the enemy down the slope, and Eva made it to the trucks.

“Pull her up!” she cried as she lifted Nellorie’s insensate body. Yannic and another rifleman grabbed her by the limbs and hoisted her into the ‘8. “Dress the arm!” she said, and turned back to the melee.

Ornaulto Dane’s sword flew out of his hand as a heretic smashed it aside and cracked a mace across his head. Blood dripping from his broken mouth, he lunged at the berserker and grabbed him by the throat. They fell to the ground, locked together, Dane choking the man with one hand and punching him in the head over and over with the other.

Novel and Khailevich were dead, the seven-foot monster stepping over their broken bodies. He wore almost no armor. Eva leapt at him, hacking into his chest. Blood dripped from the long cut, but the man just gave a deep, booming chuckle and swung his greataxe at her head. She rolled away and lashed out again, scoring a second cut, across his stomach. He just laughed, even louder, and said, “ **More scars.** ” 

This man was not human. He came at her again, forcing her to parry and block, and she stopped the blows with a strength she didn’t know she had.

Arke had left two bleeding out at his feet, and now parried blow after blow from a screaming marauder sealed inside a metal helm. He sent every strike skidding off into the dust, but the marauder had a heavy chain shirt and Arke couldn’t finish the fight with one attack. So he twisted around an overhand blow and slashed the heretic’s leg out from under him. As the man went down Arke was reversing his grip, and he plunged the sword into his chest as he lay on the ground.

She landed a heavy two-handed chop into the meat of the giant’s shoulder and he grimaced. “ **You are hard to kill.** ” She only just pulled her sword out in time to avoid his next swing. Now he was bleeding from four wounds, and he wasn’t slowing down. She tried to sidestep, to force him to turn around and give one of the riflemen a clear shot, but he matched her every movement and refused to let her shift. “ **The Blood God will treasure your pretty skull.** ”

Pya was dead on the ground, her entire midsection ripped open by a war axe. Zynd’s chest had been caved in by a hammer, and he lay there on the slope, slowly being suffocated by his own bones.

The giant’s fist slammed into Eva’s face and she went down in the dust, her head ringing. Her face stung. She felt blood on her face. The heretic was wearing edged gauntlets. She shook her head and tried to raise her weapon to defend herself. The giant was taking careful aim. He was grinning widely. He was going to cut off her head. “ **Skulls for the Skull Thro-** ”

A sword burst out of his chest. “Shut your stinking mouth.” spat Kyndi. She grabbed the blade with her off hand and _twisted_ it, and the giant screamed.

He jerked forward and took Kyndi’s weapon with him, and swung around in a wild, convulsive movement that she barely managed to dodge. She had Eva’s speed, but not her footwork, and she stumbled and fell on her back. The heretic stepped forward and brought his gigantic boot down on her. Kyndi rolled out of the way, and he kept smashing and stamping, totally focused on his drive to crush the insect that had dared to hurt him.

Eva snapped the second las-cell into her pistol and shot the giant in the back. He screamed incoherently, his smugness replaced with murderous bloodlust as he turned towards Eva, but then Kyndi had grabbed her sword and wrenched it out, and his guts were spilling onto the ground. Eva shot him again, and again, and again.

The heretical monster fell to his knees and crashed into the dust, staining it red with his blood. The crimson fluid poured slowly down the slope, mingling with the dozens of other streams pouring from the casualties of the brutal melee. Eva stared at the pooling blood, and wondered if it would flow all the way to the bottom of the hill.

“ **Skull… Throne…** ” The giant croaked. He was still alive, though not for long. “ **Warrior…** ” he raised his hand towards Eva. “ **Please…** ” He reached towards her sword, still clutched in her hand. “ **Take my skull… to the Blood God…** ” He leaned his head back on the ground, exposing his throat.

Eva had no idea why she did it. She stepped over the huge man’s body, next to his head, and she held up her sword like an executioner’s axe. The giant’s eyes shone in wordless thanks. “ **Skulls… for the … Skull … Throne-** ”

Eva cut off the last word as her sword came down and sliced through the heretic’s neck. She felt the neck snap, and the crack went up her arms and rang in her ears and sent a wonderful shudder through her entire body.

As it faded, she realized with a start that she could no longer hear the sounds of fighting. There were no more las-cracks, no more shouts and screams and cries of pain, no more ringing impacts of blade on blade and hammer and axe against armor.

The battle was over. The giant had been one of the last to fall. The dead were everywhere, and most of them were enemy.

They had done it.

Yannic and her troopers were cheering, holding their rifles in the air.

“Praise be!"

"Glory!"

"I got three!"

"1st Assault! 1st Assault!"

"For the Emperor!!"

"I got four!"

Eva stood there, stock still, watching the blood drain into the ground and down the slope as the rest of 1st Assault and 4th Rifle swarmed over the area and saw the carnage. She barely heard Sergeant Koth jostle her shoulder and smile and promise that she would get a medal for this. She didn’t even flinch as a 4th corpsman stung her bloody face with an alcohol-soaked rag and stuck some gauze to the wound.

She watched Jakob Svan finally collapse from the many wounds he had sustained after leaving four heretics dead in his wake, and watched Ornaulto Dane pick himself up and lift Svan with hands that were still sticky with the brains of the man he had beaten to death. She watched Dahlia sit down on one of the trucks and curl up with her hands around her knees, staring at her naked sword.

She watched the corpsmen settle sheets across Pya and Zynd’s bodies and carry them away.

“Y’saved my life, corporal.”

Kyndi was standing next to her. They looked at one another. Kyndi’s pretty hair was filthy and matted. Her uniform was covered with blood. A single splash of it was streaked across her face.

Eva thought she looked beautiful.

“You saved mine first.”

“Then we’re even, aye?” said Kyndi Dov, and held out her hand.

They shook. Both of their hands were still wet with blood, and it mingled and smudged as they gripped one another.

“Well done, boys and girls!” shouted Sergeant Koth, and they fell into step and began to march.

 

*     *     *

 

The enemy, Eva learned as they went back to the base, had been just a small portion of a much larger heretic warband that had attacked Novenus Primaris, one of the front-line outposts to the north. Massing in the shadow of a particularly tall nearby hill, the almost five hundred heretic fighters had fallen upon the outpost with overwhelming force. But that base’s fortifications had long since been finished, and its veteran PDF defenders, the 2nd Division of the 18th Six Hammers, had fought well and resisted stubbornly. Despite heavy casualties, the Enemy had thrown themselves at the outpost gates over and over again, until their leader finally collapsed under massive weight of fire from dozens of lasguns. With that monster’s death the heretics broke completely, and were killed to a man by the defenders.

(The Novenus assault companies, Sergeant Koth made sure to note, had acquitted themselves extremely well in the battle, killing at least a hundred heretics and holding the eastern gate when the enemy elite managed to overrun it.)

After the first failed attack, one of the enemy chieftains had decided that the outpost was not worth the trouble, and led his portion of the warband, about sixty fighters, in search of a softer target. This group had set its sights on Quintus Secundus, and, covering ground with astonishing speed, had force marched the eleven kilometers between the two bases and readied themselves for an attack.

The heretics, Aerin duVray told her, had _charged_ all the way down the opposing hill, through the valley, and straight up the slope, under heavy fire from the 4th riflemen most of the way.

The lasrifles had killed almost half of them by the time they made it up the hill (and that, Sergeant Yannic pitched in proudly, meant an almost 2-1 kill ratio between her riflemen and the enemy), leaving about thirty of them to fight Eva’s thirty-five assault troopers. Even given their inhuman toughness and stamina, the enemy had been exhausted, from both their day-long march and from a hundred-meter charge uphill at a full run. Eva’s troops had been well-drilled, prepared, and had the element of surprise. Between those factors, the contributions of Enginseer Dolst (for that, as it turned out, was his name, and he had killed four heretics himself with his carbine and weaponized bionics) and the riflemen continuing to shoot at the enemy’s rear ranks as they closed into assault, the 13th Volunteers had totally destroyed the enemy’s splinter force.

It had not been without cost. There had been seven deaths; Assault Troopers Svanska Pya, Icar Zynd, Rhaiko Khailevich, Tarvre Roye, Kaisenn Vaultersson, and Paius Novel, and a rifleman named Fenix Plinth, who had been struck in the head by a stupendously lucky shot from one of the heretics’ autoguns and killed instantly. Almost every one of the surviving 1st Assault troopers had been injured. Some injuries were not so severe; Dahlia, Eva, Arke, and Kyndi had all escaped with only minor scratches and bruises. Some, like Arvien and Svan, had been hurt badly but would likely recover quickly. But Dane, Nellorie, and duPris…

Nellorie had been stabilized, but there was no telling whether the stump of her arm would recover enough for an augmetic. And duPris and Dane had sustained horrific head trauma, and no one was sure if they would last until sundown.

Eva learned all this, and didn’t really hear any of it. She did not process anything until later, when she sat and thought back in the A2-b women’s barracks.

She had killed at least three people. Maybe more, with her gun, but she had killed three heretic fighters with her blade. She had felt her sword cut through their flesh and bone. She had felt the exact texture of every layer of the human body as her weapon sliced through them. She could picture the exact feeling in her mind, even now, but it was quickly fading. The unbelievable strength and thrilling sensations were draining out of her, leaving a cold, leaden feeling in her gut.

She had killed three men, and she had _loved_ it. She felt … full, not in her belly but in her soul, like she had never felt before. The only thing that approached it was when she and Holling were alone together, and even that…

She felt cold. What would Holling say? If he knew that she had killed men, even heretics, and been covered in their blood and _gloried_ in it, even if only in her own mind?

What if the commissar found out?

What if they went into combat again (and they would) and she killed another enemy with her sword (how she wanted to) and Druqer saw the look of exultation on her face?

“Notte?” Sergeant Koth clapped her on the back. “How you holding up?”

She swallowed and put on her usual impassive face. “I’m fine, sergeant. I just… need to take a shower.” She raised her arms and looked at her bloodstained uniform. “Get all of this off me.”

He looked at her with concern for a moment, and then nodded and stepped away.

 

*     *     *

  
  
She stayed in the shower for at least five minutes - much longer than regulations permitted, but nobody was paying attention. They were too busy celebrating the 13th Volunteers’ first combat victory.

The blood had started to dry and crust on her arms and face, and she had to scrub with a swab of rough wool to get all of it off.

She scrubbed until her skin was raw.

She handed her battered vest and greaves to a Munitorum menial for repairs, and pulled on a fresh singlet and trousers.

It helped. She felt like herself again, or at least more like herself. She touched the locket around her neck.

There was no one else in the barracks. She pulled her footlocker out from under her bed, and took some of her spirit hoard out of it.

She poured herself a glass of caraway, sat down on the bunk, and lifted the necklace over her head.

In the locket itself was a picture of her husband.

Holling was smiling. He was wearing the grin that said to anyone who saw it that he was happy, and that he did not care what anyone thought of him. He was happy on his own terms.

He had lived his whole life like that, until Eva had come along.

In the cover was her own pict. She was smiling, but not widely like him. She had never liked taking picts. She remembered this one. She had been trying to look pleasant, but she just looked sheepish and comical.

She hated the pict. She knew Holling loved it.

She took a sip of caraway and pulled her little hand-mirror out of the locker. She held the two up side-by-side.

They were very different. The Eva in the pict had long, fair hair that fell over her shoulders like golden liquid. The one in the mirror’s was cropped close as per PDF regulation. It grew out over her forehead towards her right eye, but it hadn’t yet gotten long enough for her to have it cut.

The Eva in the pict smiled and had pale skin, from living in the shaded hivesque streets of St. Michel for twenty-five years. The one in the mirror wore a determined mask; her lips were pursed, her face was drawn and tight, her eyes were perpetually narrowed slits of sharpened steel. Her skin was burnished dark and rough by eight months of PDF training under the end-of-summer sun.

She looked at the mirror, staring into her own eyes, trying to find a trace of the dark strength that had risen inside her as she fought the enemy. She wondered what it would look like, to see it in someone else’s face. What did the feeling appear as? Joy? Triumph?

Ecstasy?

An echo of the feeling, the grinding of blade on bone, went through her and she threw the mirror down. She was shaking. She raised the tumbler to her lips and drained the entire thing.

The door to the block swung open. Eva snapped the locket shut and looked over her shoulder.

Resta blinked at her. “Corporal. Was wondering where you’d gotten to.” Her eyes went to the empty glass in Eva’s hand. She smiled knowingly. “Breaking into the stash, are you?” She chuckled, but then saw the look on the corporal’s face and the sheen of sweat on her brow and cheeks.

She stepped into the room and sat down on the bunk across from Eva, who was trying to put everything back into the locker and shove it under the bed. “Stop it.” Resta put her hand on Eva’s. “Pour me some, too.”

The PDF regiments received, along with their rations, very small measures of diluted caraway. Each week’s was barely two mouthfuls, but Resta and a few of the others had started the tradition of combining the little beakers of spirits and saving them for special occasions. Eva almost never drank, so A2-b block trusted her to keep their collected hoard. By the end of training, she had saved up two bottles’ worth.

She found another tumbler and poured both her and Resta full glasses. Eva took a long draught from hers, and the spicy taste reminded her of shaded streets and evenings at ease in mid-stack bars, and drove the sensations out of her mind.

“So.” said Resta quietly. “How many did you kill?”

Eva swallowed. “Three. I think. Well. More, with the pistol. But three with the blade.”

The other woman nodded. “The others have been excusing themselves from the party. More assaults than rifles, but still. Even when the ones you kill are heretics and swine, it takes time for a person to get used to it.”

The ex-arbiter leaned forward and placed a hand on Eva’s arm. “It’s okay. I heard Dahlia throwing up in the latrines. And I don’t think Arke or Jake Svan’s first tastes of fighting went down well, either. You’re stronger. You’ll be fine.”

“No.” Eva mumbled. “You don’t understand.”

She pushed Resta’s arm away. “It’s not that I couldn’t handle killing them. It’s that I - enjoyed it too much.” She was talking fast now; she had to get this out, had to tell someone or she would implode. “I cut them, and I felt them die, and I _liked_ it…” The cold feeling in her gut would swallow her whole, unless she confessed here, now…

Resta looked at her coolly for a few moments. She took her last sip of caraway and set the glass down on the floor. She looked Eva in the eyes.

Finally she said, “To be in battle - to kill the heretic - isn’t like anything else in the galaxy. I know." She nodded. “I have known arbiters - most of them riot men - who truly _loved_ to fight.”

“Eva.” she said, as serious as she had ever seen her, and Resta was a very serious woman. “It takes all kinds of Men to make the Imperium, and to serve the Emperor. Some serve the Emperor by killing heretics. That’s why the Guard exists, isn’t it? And the Holy Inquisition. If you have found your calling here, you should rejoice!” She smiled encouragingly.

Eva nodded, slowly, uncertainly. She wanted to say something, to say that she didn’t want to find her calling here, she wanted to finish this war and go home to her husband, but the words wouldn’t come. Partly because she didn’t want to disappoint Resta but mostly because she didn’t want to think about going home to St. Spiridon’s Street, where there were no heretics and no one to cut through with her blade…

“Look,” said Resta, seeing that she was unconvinced. “I’m not a Sister. I can’t explain it properly. Talk to Father Newcastle. Go to confession. Why don’t you come to nightsong with me?”

“Nightsong?” Eva shifted uncomfortably. “I…”

She swore. “Ah, hell. I can’t. I have guard duty tonight. Me and duMar. I should probably get some sleep before 20.00.”

Eva was almost expecting her to object, to say that she had just fought in the regiment’s first combat victory and surely she could get out of guard duty this once, but Resta only frowned. “Ah. Alright, then.”

“I’ll come to dawnsong.” Eva blurted out. “Right after I come in from my watch, alright? I’ll meet you there.”

Resta smiled. “Okay. I’ll hold you to that.” She picked up the bottle, and poured them each another fourth of caraway. “To the God-Emperor.” she said, and they drank. 

Resta made the sign of the aquila, and got up. “Well,” she said, “I need a shower. But I’ll see you later, corporal.” Eva nodded, and Resta strode out of the block.

She pulled off her boots and swung herself into bed, doing her best to ignore the shouts and laughter coming from outside.

 _Throne,_ she thought, _am I going to find the Emperor out here on the frontier?_ Faith was supposed to be broken in war, not made where none had been before.

 _Well,_ she mused as the exertion of the past few hours came over her, _if I start going to service, I’m sure Holling will be happy._

 

 *     *     *

 

She didn’t remember her dreams, but when she woke her fists were clenched and the feeling was tingling in her arms and down her spine.

She shuddered and rolled out of her bunk. She looked at the aquila mounted on the front wall and whispered the Ecclesiarchy’s Oath of Loyalty.

“ _The Emperor is my God and my Emperor, and he sits upon his Golden Throne, far above the ken of mortal men, and stands against the malices of the alien, and the mutant, and the heretic, and I swear, by my immortal soul, to stand against the alien, and the mutant, and the heretic, and to live in the Emperor’s Light, and to uphold the Imperial Creed and the Word of the Emperor, as long as I shall live. The Emperor is my God and my Emperor…_ ”

By the end of the third recitation the feeling had receded into her memory, and she got to her feet. Had she woken anyone up? That would be a fine showing. Eva Notte, the dependable, rock-solid corporal for B squad, falling out of bed with the chills and praying convulsively.

She shook her head and checked the chron. 19.38 hours. Barely enough time to suit up. She laced up her boots and hurried out to the armory.

 

*     *     *

 

Night watch was twenty patrol teams of one assault and one rifleman. Every team had a sector of the base. Watch was seven Terran hours; 20.00 to 6.00. Eva had just gotten about a watch’s worth of sleep, so she figured she’d be fine until at least her first labor shift tomorrow.

She checked into the armory. Her pauldron had been replaced and her uniform cleaned while she slept.

She suited up.

Skin-tight netting with interwoven flak-armor plates. Check. Arbiter-pattern flak greaves. Check. Standard Guard combat boots, with three-inch industrial rubber soles. Check. Protruding buckle-on ankle-plates that joined the leggings and boots. Check.  
One-piece Imperial heavy flak vest, pulled over the head and then buckled around the waist, rated (fortunately for Dahlia) for auto-rounds up to .45 caliber and standard Imperial las-weapons up to sixty percent charge, as well as shock-absorbing structure for use against all manner of close combat weapons. Assault gloves, with metal wrist gauntlets to protect the lower arms.

Heavy assault-pattern flak pauldrons, to protect the shoulders and upper arms, buckled under the armpit and attached to the vest by magnet-snaps.

One Imperial tactical belt. One Mk XV laspistol, holstered, and five fresh las-cells. Three frag grenades. One PDF Coquero-style sheath - just a short metal tube belted to her waist instead of a full scabbard.

One Imperial infantry longsword.

Eva looked at her trusted weapon for a long moment before she picked it up. Her palm tingled, and she murmured a quick prayer over the blade as she slid it into the sheath.

Suddenly she was angry. Look at her, jumping at shadows and praying at every little thing like some sort of Throne-botherer! This was absurd! She was a soldier! A damn good one! And right now, she was about to be late for a watch!

She bunched up her hair, jammed her ceramite helmet over her head, clicked her blast goggles into place in front of her eyes, and marched out of the armory.

 

*     *     *

  
  
It was getting significantly colder as Eva stepped outside. She tied her sand scarf around her neck.

At 19.58 she met Trooper duMar outside the night watch post.

“Assault corporal, ma’am.” He saluted and looked over his shoulder at the door. “Good caffeine tonight, ma’am. Grab some before we go?”

“Absolutely. I just woke up.”

The duty sergeant insisted on pouring Eva a full flask of caffeine to take with her. Despite outranking her he saluted, as did the twenty men on standby in the watch post. Eva bowed her head graciously, then saluted the sergeant and strode out with duMar.

The rifleman chuckled. “Could get used to that, eh, corporal?”

She pulled down her scarf to take a sip of caffeine. “I killed three. Svan killed four.” She swallowed. It numbed her mouth and tasted like it had had the sugar chemically extracted, but it was hot. “Not going to turn down free caff, though.”

Their watch was on the southeast perimeter, down by G block and the officers’ barracks. It was a few minutes’ walk, and duMar slung his rifle on its strap and rubbed his gloved hands together. “Hell. Where’d this come from? We were sweating today in the trench.”

Eva blew out. She could see her breath. “I heard there’s snow over in Sargonia.” she said. “Winter’s going to fall fast this year.”

DuMar spent the circuit of the barracks complaining good-naturedly about everything from the weather to the labour shifts to the price of cooking oil back home in the city. He was like that, she knew. He never shut up, and never meant a word of it.  
Except when talking about heretics, of course. She tuned him out, and let her training take over; one foot in front of the other, one hand on the butt of her pistol, constantly scanning the paths and alleys of the base for activity, while she lost herself in thought.

“Trooper?” she said, cutting off duMar’s rant about the governor secondary.

“-and if you’ll believe it-” he blinked. “Ma’am?”

“Are you a religious man, duMar?”

“Well…” he looked confused, and a bit wary. “I – yes, of course.”

Eva suddenly realized what she was coming off as. “Never mind, trooper. I’m not a commissar, it’s not my business.”

“No, ma’am. It was just sudden and, well, yes, I am.”

“What does the Emperor mean to you, trooper?”

“Ma’am?”

She sighed. “When you pray, what do you pray for?”

“Well… I suppose I pray for my brother, ma’am.”

“Your brother?”

“Yes, ma’am. He died, about four years back. Factorum accident.”

“I’m sorry.”

“So am I, corporal.”

“Yes. Well.”

He adjusted his shoulder strap. “I miss him, but I imagine he’s at the Emperor’s side now. So I pray, and I ask the Emperor to take care of him.”

“You and your brother were close?”

“Yes, ma’am, very.”

They walked between G1-a and G1-b. She could hear thunderous snoring coming out of the heavy gunners’ barracks. Past the end of the row was the officers’ quarters, where the commissar bunked.

“Ma’am, if I may…”

She glanced at him. “Hm?”

“Why do you ask?”

She frowned deeply behind her sand-scarf and wondered how to put it into words.

“I’ve … never been a spiritual sort, duMar. But going into combat… almost getting killed at least once…”

He nodded. “I understand, ma’am. I used to have a neighbor - old, old man, couldn’t have been younger than eighty. And he fought in the ‘96 attacks. At the refineries. He told me all his war stories, and he told me - he told me he found the Emperor out there. You know, there was this one man, this crazy bastard - literally! In one of his stories, I mean…”

Resta was trying to save her soul. It was the sort of thing she did.

Eva wasn’t interested in being proselytized. She didn’t want to go to templum every single day and stop twenty-one times a day for prayers and keep an aquila in every room.

But even now, she wanted to fight again, to slice through flesh with her blade and feel that sensation going up her arm and down her spine…

She shuddered slightly, though duMar was too caught up in his ramblings to notice, and pushed it down. She'd go to dawnsong. She'd talk to the chaplain. She'd pray. She knew how to pray, at least. She knew Holling must be praying for her. It was the least she could do, she thought, with a twinge of guilt. Return the favor.

That's all it was. Returning the favor.

She could live with that.

“…and this crazy dam with the topknot doesn’t budge, if you’ll believe it. She just picks up the stubber - the whole thing! - and just … keeps shooting with a hundred heretics running at her.” duMar’s voice was quiet and somber now. “And they never saw her again. I mean, I can’t even imagine…”

“Well, you won’t have to for much longer.” Eva said.

“Oh. Yes.”

“They’ll be back, duMar. And we all need to be ready.”

He nodded. “Yes, ma’am.”

He paused, and then said, “Ma’am, I think you should know. You and 1st … and the rifles, too, you’re a real inspiration to everyone in my company.”

“People died, duMar.”

“Yes, but so few, and you killed so many… well, I guess if we can do that a few more times when we engage the rest of the heretics, we’ll be just fine, won’t we?”

“What if one of the three who died had been you?” she asked, knowing it probably wasn’t the best for morale.

He shrugged and grinned, a bit unsteadily. “Signed up for it, didn’t I?”

She shook her head, smiling for the first time since the battle. “You’re too optimistic to be PDF…”

She stopped mid-sentence and raised a hand for a halt.

Something had moved in the shadows by the officers’ quarters. She narrowed her eyes. “Do you see that?” she whispered to duMar.

He had taken his rifle off his back. “What?”

“Cover me.”

She drew her pistol and aimed it at the door, slowly stepping in closer.

The door to the officers’ quarters was ajar. There was a light on somewhere inside, and she heard someone curse, just on the edge of her hearing. She reached up for the vox-piece fixed to the front of her vest.

As she pushed the door open, she almost missed the shape flattened behind it.

Kjata jumped on her from behind, aiming a glinting dagger right between Eva’s shoulder blades, but she turned, and caught the arm holding the dagger as it came down. She slammed the gang-girl’s hand into the wall and the knife clattered to the floor.

Kjata swung at her face, but her hand banged into Eva’s blast goggles and she recoiled in pain.

Eva drew her sword, slamming the fist holding it into Kjata’s chin like a ring-fighter delivering a knockout punch, and the girl slumped, dazed. She let her fall, and yelled for duMar while she finished drawing her blade and stalked down the hallway.

The door at the end of the hall, to Druqer’s room, was open, and she could see the shadow of a man. She slid up to the side of the door, glanced back to see that duMar was behind her, and swung around the doorjamb. Grieger was crouched in the room, an active cogitator behind him, holding a pistol.

A sword came down on her arm from the side. The assault gloves stopped the blade but the shock jarred her arm and she dropped her pistol a second time.

Grieger’s gun cracked and she felt the las-round burrow into her vest.

The swordsman swung at her again. It was Daykis. She kicked out high, smashing her boot into his face, and then dodged back. The second las-round burned into the wall.

She launched herself at Grieger. He was the one with the gun; he was the most dangerous.

He had the eyes of a cornered animal.

Her sword-arm swung at his face, but he brought up his empty hand to block. Her off-hand grabbed the wrist of his gun arm and wrenched it up as he tried to pull the trigger. It fired into the ceiling, twice, showering them with plas-crete fragments, and then she wrenched the arm around and twisted it until the gun fell from his grip.

Daykis roared in pain behind her and she knew duMar had taken him by surprise. Grieger brought up his knee into her stomach but it just banged on her vest and she threw him onto the ground. Grieger was a dangerous man, but Eva was a fully armored Planetary Defense Force assault trooper, and he was a thug without a gun.

“I could have just run you through right there, Jans.” she growled as she touched the tip of her blade to his Adam‘s apple. “But I’d rather see you hang. I told you what I’d do if you gave me any more trouble.”

DuMar cried out, and Eva turned in time to see him collapse. One of the black-armored secret ops was standing over him, staring dispassionately through the blank eyes of his gas mask. He lifted his weapon. “What are you doing?!” Eva cried, but he had already slammed the stock of the rifle into the back of duMar’s neck, knocking him unconscious.

He pointed his hellgun at her. “In the name of the Golden Throne, you are under arrest. All of you.”

“Now, wait just a moment.” Eva stepped forward.

The secret ops shot her in the head.

Eva hit the floor, _hard_. She could smell burning. The skin of her face tingled. Her vision was blurred. She felt like she had been punched in the face, hard. The **_crack_ ** of the low-pulse hellgun shot rang in her ears. The armaglas lenses of her goggles had partially melted.

She could feel her sword, still gripped in her hand, but she couldn’t move her legs or arms. All she could do was twitch.

She heard voices, incomprehensible to her ringing ears. She heard footsteps, and bangs and thuds. Someone kicked her in the side.

Rough hands took hold of her head and pulled her helmet off. The ruined goggles came with them. Her vision slowly cleared, resolving the black shapes moving around her as three more secret ops, dragging duMar, Grieger, and Daykis to their feet, and the towering figure in the storm-coat standing over her as Commissar Druqer.

“Thieves.” he snarled as he glared down at her. “Spies! Heretics!!” He waved his hand wildly around the room. “So perverse, so ruled by your baser instincts of greed and want that you cannot even wait to flee before you begin fighting over your ill-gotten gains! You _sicken_ me!”

He gestured to a fourth stormtrooper. “Take them away! I will make an _example_ of them.” The brutish man grabbed Eva by the shoulders and lifted her effortlessly, seemingly having no trouble with her muscled frame and her full PDF assault gear. She tried to fight, but all she could do was wriggle weakly in the secret ops’ arms.

As the stormtrooper pulled out a shock maul, the last thing Eva saw was Druqer looking at her, eyes narrowed, glaring at her with undisguised hatred, and she remembered her own words to Kyndi.

 _Druqer wants an execution. And it’s not going to be any of the_ troopers _in my platoon._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'll say this. Formatting something written in an ordinary word processor for a site like this takes some work, but I'd forgotten how much I prefer this format as opposed to normal print and paragraph format for readability.


	5. Act I, Chapter Four: Winter

The first thing they took was her sword.

She came to in a tiny laundry room, where the secret ops laid her out on a big ironing board, and roughly stripped her.

One of them stood at the entrance to the room with a laspistol in his hands while the other two took off her armor and clothing, piece by piece, and she didn’t care, because the weight of her sword was gone from her hip. Her hands clenched and unclenched compulsively, and the stormtroopers had to hold her hands shut to get her gloves off.

Then they took her locket.

The brute who removed it ripped it off of her neck, snapping the silver chain, and threw it onto the growing pile of wargear. They didn’t stack or assemble her kit as it came off. They treated it like refuse; tossing it into a pile without a second glance. The one who took the locket actually made the sign of the aquila as he dropped it, as though he had just touched something unclean.

When they got to her smallclothes one of them just made a disgusted noise and began peeling them off, and when she was totally naked they forced her into a set of gray one-size trousers and a leather penitent’s harness, like a prisoner’s uniform. Then they pulled out a set of restraining binders and mag-locked her arms and legs together by the ankles and backs of her hands, and took her down, into the rockcrete substructure of Quintus Secundus, to the reinforced crypt that contained the base's lockup.

“This is a mistake.” she said hoarsely as they manhandled her down the stairs.

The one behind her jammed his knee into her back. **“Silence.”** he said, his voice made into a snarl by the filter mask. She gritted her teeth.

“They were breaking into the officers’ quarters. I stopped them.”

**“Silence!”**

“You are making a-”

He hit her with the shock maul again.

 

*      *      *

 

She was awakened by singing.

“ _…so he lit a cigar and he told me his price_  
 _And then asked me to tell him mine_  
 _He said, ‘Jans, what’s your vice?’, and I said to the Graff_  
 _'It’s a bag of fresh ice and a good honest word_  
 _It’s a night of fine company, good for a laugh_  
 _And a bottle of six hundred ninety-five wine!'_ ”

“Shut up.” she mumbled.

She was lying on the floor of a cell. She tried to sit up, but she couldn’t move her arms. She remembered the mag-bracers.

“Make me, Notte.” said Jans Grieger.

“How-” Her mouth was dry. “How long have I been out?” She coughed, quietly.

“Ah, maybe three hours since they brought us in. That guy must have hit you hard.” He laughed. “Hey, Day? Think we can get him nominated for a medal?” She could hear Daykis‘s deep voice chuckling briefly in the cell next to hers.

She snarled, and looked up.

He was sitting in the cell across from her. His hands were bound too, but he was propped up against the wall. He was smiling a bitter, false, plastered-on smile. “What’s funny?” she rasped, as she tried to maneuver herself into at least a sitting position.

“Nothing really.” he said. “It’s just that you’re rather worse off than I am.”

“How do you figure that?” Her hands were numb and prickling. The bracers were cutting off circulation.

He smiled, and there was even less humor in it than before. “I’ve been in prison before.” “Yeah,” she said, flopping onto her stomach. “Not going to be able to duck the Magistratum by signing up for the Force this time, are you?”

“Neither are you. And at least I get to watch you hang with me.”

She jumped, once, and got her knees under her, and then flexed her back muscles to lift herself upright. “You’re out of your mind, Grieger.” she grunted irritably. “This is a huge bloody misunderstanding. They’re going to murder Druqer when the lieutenant colonel gets here and hears about this-”

He laughed, so long and so hard he almost fell over. Daykis snorted with mirth in the next cell. “The _gak_ is so funny?!” she snarled.

“You’re absolutely _adorable_ , Notte.” he said, shaking his head. “You think the commissar is going to listen to reason? Are we talking about the same man?” He sniggered, just a few times, the way you do when you recover from a truly great joke, and then realize a second time just how good it was. “He’s going to string up the lot of us, Notte, and they’re probably going to canonize him for it! Hah! You’re going to swing with me! I can die with that!”

“You mean you can live with it.”

He grinned again, and his eyes sparkled with malice, and he looked almost as mad as the heretics she had seen at sword-point. “No. I don’t.” 

 

*      *      *

 

By Eva’s reckoning it was about an hour and a half before one of the secret ops came in with beakers of water and tiny amounts of gruel for each of them. “Aren’t you going to unbind me?” Eva said as he opened the door to her cell and stepped inside.

He stared at her for a moment and dropped a tube, the sort of thing invalids use instead of chewing, into the gruel. He put the tray and the tube in front of her and closed the cell again. She bent down and sniffed the gruel. It had absolutely no smell, which she doubted was a good sign. “I’m not hungry.” she replied.

The stormtrooper clanged his shock maul menacingly against the bars. **“Drink it.”** he said. Grieger was already half done with his pitiful ration.

“This is a mistake.” she said again, and he activated the maul’s power field and reached for the door handle.

She bent, fuming, and started to drink the gruel.

She almost wished for some mill sugar to put in it. It wouldn’t have helped, but the option would have been nice.

The secret ops opened the doors of two more cells after hers and Grieger’s. She assumed the last was Kjata. “Where’s duMar?” she said to Grieger. He just rolled his eyes and leered at her.

The stormtrooper marched back past her cell, holding two empty trays. _Alright, Eva. Try being polite. Put those up-stack manners to work._ “Sir?” she said. He paused. “Please, sir. Do you know what happened to duMar? Rifle Trooper duMar? He was my partner on night watch. Is he here?”

The trooper unlocked her door and stepped inside. “Sir?”

He hit her across the head with his shock maul. He didn’t even bother activating it, he just bludgeoned her and sent her sprawling to the floor. She wanted to clutch her head, which had to have been cracked open, that was the only way it could hurt so much, but she couldn’t move her arms, and she only hurt her back and rubbed her wrists against the bracers until her whole body hurt.

 **“Do not talk to me, heretic.”** growled the stormtrooper, and he picked up her tray and closed the cell door behind him.

She lay there on the ground, shaking, bleeding a little from her forehead, fighting with all her willpower not to cry or vomit from the pain, because she had fallen facing Grieger and she would not show that kind of weakness in front of him, she would die first.

Not a single tear escaped her, and she finally managed to open her eyes, and saw him smiling at her with that animal look on his face. “This is the Emperor’s justice, corporal.” he said, and started whistling the tune of his song about the Graff.

Eva remembered what she had promised herself. She curled up on the bare floor of the cell, and prayed to the Emperor that this was a mistake, and that she would see Holling again. 

 

*      *      *

 

The door to the lockup swung open again.

Eva lifted her head. The pain had dulled. Now it was just a heavy, persistent throb. She thought she could hear her heart pounding in her ears.

She really wanted a cold drink.

She pushed herself up. She tried to get her legs under her again, but her head pounded harder and she slumped back to the ground.

Diamond-Eyes stepped into the block, and set a chair down in front of her cell, facing away, the back pointing at her.

She wormed her way around until she could inch towards him, and then lifted herself onto her knees. She wouldn’t show weakness in front of this bastard, either. “What is this about?” she croaked.

The secret ops sat down in the chair, resting his arms on the back, and didn’t respond. “I haven’t done anything.” she said, trying to sound insistent. “I arrested these three. I’m not a heretic.”

He didn’t say a word, His blank artificial eyes just regarded her coldly. “Please.” she said, aware that she probably sounded pathetic. “I’m not a heretic. I’ve found the Emperor out here, I have. I was going to go to dawnsong right after my watch…”

He appraised her for a moment more, and then shook his head and got up. “Oh, you _are_ dangerous.” he rumbled, and marched out of the room, slamming the door behind him. 

 

*      *      *

 

 

She was woken once more, for a second helping of water and watery gruel, and forced herself to swallow all of it.

It made her head throb even harder, but she knew what would happen if she didn’t drink, and she wasn’t sure she would survive another blow to the head.

After the trooper left, her stomach finally did what it had been threatening to do for hours and forced out everything in it. She puked up both of the lockup meals and the caffeine, which amounted to a puddle of stained brown water and some mushy oats, and then collapsed again.

After a moment she mustered herself and made her legs push her to the other side of the tiny cell, away from the puddle, and she curled up into a ball and passed out again.

 

*      *      *

 

There was a banging at the door.

It flew open. “-and I will take responsibility, and upon _my_ soul be it!”

“Don’t listen to anything she says.” snarled the guard.

“I am sure the Emperor will protect me, should she choose to breathe fire, or spit venom, or transform into the Night Haunter before my eyes!” snapped Father Newcastle, and slammed the door behind him.

“Eva.”

The chaplain knelt before her cell. He made the sign of the aquila and spoke a prayer, and then looked up at her. “Can you rise?”

His weathered face was kind and she nodded slowly. For a third time she squirmed and struggled until she managed to get to her knees and sit up.

Newcastle’s eyes went to the puddle of vomit on the floor and he pursed his lips in disgust. He reached into his robes and pulled out a flask. “Drink this.” He reached through the bars and held it out to her. “It’s tea.” he said when she shook her head. “It will help.”

He held it to her lips and she drank, and it was cool and bitter, and it tasted like caw root, and it made her feel better. “Th-thank you.” she stammered, and the priest nodded. He pulled up the chair that Diamond-Eyes had left, and sat down.

“What really happened, Eva?”

“What’s happening outside? Where’s duMar?” she faltered. “What - what hour is it?”

“After 12.00.” he said. “First, tell me the truth.”

She gathered her thoughts. “I was on night watch. It was scheduled, you can check the roster. It was set when we arrived here. I went on patrol with duMar. We talked.”

“About what?”

“We - we discussed religion.” The priest raised his eyebrows, but nodded for her to continue.

“After a few rounds, about half a standard hour, I saw something moving at the door to the officers’ barracks. We investigated, and Trooper Kjata attacked me with a knife. I incapacitated her and searched the building, where I saw movement inside the commissar’s quarters.

“I investigated, and was attacked by Trooper Daykis and Trooper Grieger. I assumed they had broken in, and duMar and I incapacitated them, at which point we were suddenly attacked by the secret ops.

She looked pleadingly at him. “That is what happened.”

Newcastle knelt for a few moments, looking her in the eye, and then said, “Trooper duMar has condemned you.”

“What?!”

“He claims that you entered the officers’ barracks with Trooper Grieger and his louts, and threatened to kill him if he did not keep silent.”

Eva’s jaw dropped.

The priest scowled, cold, hard anger burning in his gaze. “He also looks like death and will not meet my eyes. And he did not come to confession.” He lowered his head. “He is being manipulated.”

“Why?” said Eva after a moment. “Why all this trouble to lock me up? What have I done?”

“I do not know,” admitted the priest, “but I suspect Commissar Druqer has simply made up his mind, and that thug with the augmetic eyes would rather listen to him than me.” “Who is he?”

He gave a heavy sigh. “He is a Throne agent, Eva.”

The cold weight dropped back into her stomach and froze her breathing. Do they know?! “The Inquisition? Why are they - do they suspect me of heresy?”

He narrowed his eyes. “Should they?”

_Into the breach, Notte._

“Father,” she said, calling the priest by his preferred title for the first time, “I wish to confess.”

He looked at her for a long while, his eyes wise and piercing, and then he turned and rapped on the iron door to the lockup. When the stormtrooper opened it partway, he said, “I am giving the prisoner last rites.” The trooper grunted something, and Newcastle just slammed the door a second time.

He lifted the aquila from around his neck, and, pulling out some string from the inside pocket of his Ministorum robes, hung it from the bars over their heads.

He drew out a piece of yellow chalk, remarking with a serious smile that a good chaplain is prepared to hallow an altar anywhere, and drew a square on the rockcrete under the hanging eagle.

He spoke the Imperial Creed, and the Illumination in The Emperor’s Sight, and several other prayers, and then he turned his eyes back to her.

“Speak the 5th Revelation of Saint Michel.”

Eva swallowed. The 5th Revelation had always unsettled her, and it took her a moment to find the words.

“My sins are mine and mine alone, and never can they be undone, and forever after will they mar the perfection of my human soul, until I go to the Emperor’s side. But if I hold Him in my heart, and think of Him always, and perform righteous acts in His name,

my soul can be made to shine again, until the blackened marks of heresy that I have inscribed there with mine own actions grow faint in the light of my spirit, and in the radiance of His glory. Ave Imperator.”

“Ave Imperator.” murmured the priest. “Now speak your sins, and the Emperor will hear you.”

She told him about how she hadn’t exchanged letters with her husband in too long. She told him about Svan, and about Grieger, and about Kyndi.

She told him about her conversations with Resta and duMar.

She told him about killing.

“And I keep remembering it, Father, and, Emperor help me, I want to keep killing…”

The priest knelt there before her for a moment, and then leaned forward, pushing his arm between the bars as far as possible. He was just able to place a hand on her knee. “I am glad that you chose to confess, Eva, but I cannot forgive you, for there is nothing to forgive.” He smiled. “Did not the Saint say that only the greatest of the Emperor’s servants do not recognize their own greatness?

“You take joy in death because it is heretics who die on your blade, and to kill them and remove them from the Emperor’s sight is a noble, noble act!” He shook his head. “You say that you do not wish to take joy in killing your fellow Man, and that too is supremely noble - never should Man lay hands upon Man - but the heretical fiends we face on the battlefield are not human, Eva! They gave up the right to be called human when they chose to give themselves to evil. Blessed is the mind too small for doubt.”

“Blessed is the mind too small for doubt.” she repeated, as she remembered the very human desperation in the giant’s eyes as he begged her to cut off his head.

Newcastle settled back on his knees. His hands absently brushed some yellow chalk off of his robes. He regarded her, quietly.

“Will you tell me something?”

She blinked. “What, father?”

“Why don’t you use your first name?”

She sighed.

“I looked at your enlistment papers." he said. "Scaea Evangeline Notte. Why do you use your middle name?”

“While I’m confessing, right?”

He nodded encouragingly.

“Because my first name is ridiculous.”

“What? Why?”

She scowled. “It’s something my idiot mother found in a book. It means ‘goddess’ in some old pre-Imperial language. It’s stupid and pretentious, and 'Evangeline’s' no better. _Throne_ , I hate the name Evangeline.” She snorted in bitter laughter.

Newcastle was gazing at her. “So you are that Scaea Notte.”

She looked away, grimacing. “Aye.”

“I have wondered, but I never really thought...”

“Yes, well, it’s me.” she snapped. “Don’t spread it around, chaplain.”

“But why?” he said. “Why are you here?”

Eva closed her eyes for a long moment.

He didn’t need to know. She could tell him to go away, and he would. The chaplain was nosy, but not that nosy.

But, she thought, it might make a serious difference at her trial. Might take her somewhere she didn’t want to go afterwards, but it was better than being hung…

“If you ever breathe a word of this to anyone in the ranks, I’ll never speak to you again, Father. As far as they are concerned, I am just Corporal Notte who beats the shit out of them in the sparring circle.”

“I swear, Eva.”

“Swear on the sword.” she said fiercely.

“I swear on the broken sword of Saint Michel,” he said, placing a hand over his heart, “that drained the blood of the Archenemy into the earth.”

She sat back on her knees, and said, quietly enough that he had to lean forward to hear her, “My father, Lord Notte, was a pompous ass.”

Newcastle smiled very slightly. “Still is, from what I hear.”

She nodded. “It took my mother a long time to have a child. When I finally arrived it was bloody Candlemas for him. ‘Oh, I have a daughter! I can carry on the family line, get her a good position in industry, buy her a commission!’ The possibilities were bloody endless.” she said, and there was real hatred in her voice. “And when I grew up pretty it made it worse. ‘Oh, look at her,’ he’d say to my mother, ‘she’s beautiful! She’ll find a husband in Primaris hive for sure!’ Wanted to marry me off, get the family off the frontier and back into the capital.”

The priest nodded. “It must have been hard.”

“It was a nightmare.” she growled. “So I started sneaking out. I knew all the House guard - they’d let me off the estate so I could go to the salons and taverns down-stack at night.”

“And it was wild and desperate and filthy compared to home, but I loved it. For a while.”

She grimaced. “Then I realized that nothing was different. Everyone still wanted something. I was pretty, so every man and half the women I met wanted to get into my pants. Or someone would find out I was from up-stack and start crown-digging. But it was better than staying at home and listening to my father talk about which inland noble family he’d been in discussions for a marriage contract with that week, so I kept going.”

“Then I met Holling.”

“Your husband.”

“Mhm. He's a machinist, lives and works in mid-stack.”

“He was the only one who never wanted anything from me.” she said after a moment. "We saw one another for … I think six months before I asked him to marry me.”

“I presume that he was _not_ secretly the heir to some wealthy noble house that would revitalize your family fortunes.”

“No.”

“Ah. And Lord Notte…”

She snorted. “I didn’t even bother telling him. I didn’t want the trouble. I waited until he was away, packed my things, told my mother, and walked out.”

She glared at him. “Does the Emperor not approve of that, father?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. I’m not the Emperor. But I do know that to sit on a nobleman’s arm in a hive spire in Primaris was not your true calling, so I suspect that the Emperor approves.”

“Right.” she snorted. “My true calling is to rot in a cell because a bunch of madmen in uniforms think I’m a heretic.”

“Eva.” he said, gripping the bars. “This will not stand. There will be a trial. I have voxed the Chaplaincy and the Officio Commissariat Adobe. You have just lead the unit’s first combat victory. They will not let you hang.”

“If I stay in here any longer these binds are going to ruin my sword arms.”

“Now that,” said Father Newcastle, “the Emperor would not approve of. And you did not tell me how you came to be in the Defense Force.”

She glowered. “After I left, my father went berserk. He tried to have me arrested but the arbites wouldn’t go for it. So he just cut off my account, faster than I expected. Holling and I had wanted a larger hab… My father shut down my account before we could finish paying it off. So he stranded us there, in debt, and we’ve been working to pay it off for four years. When the levies were announced I figured I’d sign up, take the governor’s crown, and come home and pay off the hab.”

There was quiet in the impromptu confessional. Newcastle sat in the chair, hands clasped, clearly deep in thought. Eva closed her eyes again. Her hands started to clench. It was turning into a compulsion.

She wanted her sword. And she wanted to see her husband’s face again. She hoped he would never find out about this.

Newcastle got to his feet. “I must go, Eva.” he said, reaching up and taking down the aquila.

“Father.”

He paused in settling it back around his neck. “Yes?”

“They took my locket. It’s silver. It has picts inside, of my husband and I. Could you…?”

“I will try.”

“All I ask. Thank you.”

“The Emperor Protects. Pray, Eva, and He will help you.”

“I will, father.”

He left the lockup, holding his aquila in his hand and murmuring prayers under his breath. She smiled to herself. Maybe the Emperor had sent him to watch over her. That was what Holling would say, she was sure.

She wondered if he had gotten her letter yet, and then realized that it had probably been held back if she was suspected of something. _Hell_ , she thought, _with how the stormtroopers treated the rest of my things they probably burned it._

Grieger sniggered in the other cell. “The holy father just signed your death warrant, Notte.” She ignored him and lay down on her side. “Druqer’s not going to let you see trial!” she closed her eyes and didn’t respond. Instead, she prayed.

“The Emperor is my God and my Emperor.” she whispered to herself. “Fear denies faith. Blessed is the mind too small for doubt…”

 

 

*      *      *

  
Newcastle didn’t come to visit her again.

No one did, except the black-armored secret ops, who appeared one more time to hand them their pathetic meals. Tasteless as it was, she took her time with it, because it was something to do.

 _A mind without purpose will walk in dark places_. Who had written that? Some book, half-remembered from her mother’s library, a long time ago…

It was true, too true. There was nothing to do, nothing to do but stare at the wall and think, and her thoughts kept drifting to the what ifs and maybes. _What if Newcastle is wrong? Maybe the commissars will listen to their own and just have me hung. What if I never get to see Holling again? What if all he hears is that I’m a heretic and I tried to rob a commissar? What if they convict me, and then start questioning everyone near me? Resta, Dahlia, Jake Svan, Sergeant Koth, Holling …_

At that last thought Eva felt literally sick to her stomach, and had to pray for eight solid minutes to get the thought out of her head.

She kept praying, as the chaplain had advised her, and it helped distract her from thinking about what might happen, but she only knew so many prayers. She cursed herself for not being religious enough.

Holling would have known more. She would pray with him, she swore that to herself and to the Emperor, every single night before bed, if only she could make it home and see him again.

And no matter how many times she recited the Oath of Loyalty and the _vobis Michel_ and the Revelations and the Proverbs and what she remembered of the Canticles of Spiridon none of it mattered anyway because if she could just lodge a sword in someone’s ribcage her palms would finally stop itching and it would just wash away all of her problems…

Grieger tried to taunt her a few more times, but she ignored him. She told herself that he wasn’t important to her, that he was scum, swine, less than nothing.

_Cut him, then. That's what I'll do. No one will miss him. Sever his arteries. Make it last. Let all his blood drain out onto the ground before I pull out the blade…_

She licked her lips a few times at the idea.

 

*      *      *

 

  
She didn’t have a chron, and she couldn’t see the sun, so she started counting the length of her prayers. One Holy Terra. Two Holy Terra. Three Holy Terra. The Oath of Loyalty was eleven and a half Holy Terras. The psalms were two or three each (Psalms and Reflections page three was twenty-four total.).The 5th Revelation was fifteen. Four 5th Revelations made a Terran minute. Two hundred and forty 5th Revelations made a Terran hour.

Hours of prayer-time rolled by, but every now and again the count would slip. Her mind would wander off into dark rooms where she was alone with a knife and a helpless Grieger, or onto hazy battlefields, her enemies always faceless and ethereal but always dying with a satisfying impact. They moved about her, shifting and dodging, but each time she went for the kill stroke her blade found its mark.

A figure moved behind her but before she could turn to see it there was a bang, and she thought one of her foes had done the unthinkable and pulled a gun in the middle of a blade fight.

But it was the door to the lockup slamming open again, and she jerked awake. How long had it been? The images in her head flickered again even as she was opening her eyes. For a split second, the figure behind her was standing there, in the cell. She saw a flowing robe and heard the  _clink_ of chainmail.

Then it was gone, and a burly stormtrooper was lifting her to her feet and unlocking her mag-greaves. _Throne_ , Eva thought, as the trooper pushed her and the others towards the door. _I think I’m going mad._

 

*      *      *

 

**7.15 Terran (sidereal)**   
**Planet Adobe**   
**Forward Outpost Quintus Secundus**   
**13th Volunteers, St. Michel, 3rd Division**   
**1st Assault Company, 2nd Platoon**   
**Day 8 of deployment**

  
It had not gotten any warmer since the previous night.

Rather, the clouds had thickened and filled the sky, and light snow was falling onto the base. The lanes and paths were already filled with drifts of white powder. A chill breeze was whistling between the buildings, blowing snow into their faces and stealing the breath from their lungs. Her leather prisoner’s uniform shielded her somewhat, but she had no sleeves, and in an instant she was too cold to remember her prayers.

“Wh-what is this?” The trooper kicked her and she yelped. She heard Grieger laugh.

 _What's happening?_ She thought frantically, trying to clear her head. _Are they moving us to different cells? Are we going to trial early?_

Her feet went numb. Her restraint greaves were high, but not weather-sealed, and they quickly filled with melting snow as the trooper pushed her onward. Her muscles ached inside the locked bracers.

She saw the commissar marching towards her, every inch the personal representative of the Emperor's authority in the Imperial military. A secret ops trooper growled, **“Problem, commissar?”**

“None. Bring them up, double time. Let us get this over with.”

"Commissar!" The freezing air stung her throat as she turned towards him. "What's happening? Where are we going?"

"To your execution, heretic."

"Ex - execution?! The - the trial - the commissars can't be here already!"

"I am a commissar."

"But -" Eva gasped. "for a court-martial you need-"

"There will be no court-martial!" he snapped. "Court-martials are for soldiers! You are a heretic, and you have no rights under Imperial Law!"

This couldn't be happening.

This could not happen. She felt anger boil up inside her, pushing her back from crushing despair. "I am a soldier. I'm the best damn soldier in this division. What are you-"

A heavy boot swept her feet out from under her and ground her face into the snowy earth. **"No more mouth out of you."** growled the secret ops, but Druqer's steel-toes crunched and she heard his voice in her ear - the quietest she had ever heard him speak.

"If you say one more word, I will take my gun to your head and you will not even receive the dignity of a formal execution. Now be quiet, and go to your fate with some grace. You will never have the chance to spread _lies_ about me.."

"What are you talking about?" Eva forgot to snap or growl, such was her confusion, but the commissar withdrew and grabbed her by the collar.

"To the gallows!" he shouted, pulling her to her feet and pressing the mouth of his boltgun into her back.

 

*      *      *

  
They marched her forward for twenty-five and a half Oaths of Loyalty.

Give or take a few Holy Terras.

They rounded the corner at the Munitorum barracks, through the T-section where the trooper barracks and the Munitorum barracks intersected. Father Newcastle was storming down the steps from the chapel. "Commissar!" He roared. The troopers stopped pushing them. "Commissar! What is this? What in the name of the God-Emperor is this?!"

"I am bringing these heretics to justice, father."

"Heretics? _Heretics?!_ " She could see the priest's face going red. "What heretics? All I see are three criminals and the exemplary soldier who caught them!"

"That soldier, father, was in my private quarters without permission, and-"

"Without your - what did you expect?! For her to come find you, and give those malcontents ample time to escape?"

"Father." snapped the commissar. "You are making a scene." He stepped closer to the priest and dropped his voice, and Eva couldn't hear anything further that was said.

Grieger was chuckling in what sounded like triumph. "I did tell you, Notte." he said quietly. "That he wouldn't let you see trial."

"What are you talking about?" she hissed, bracing herself for the retaliatory gun-stock slamming into her neck, but it didn't come. The stormtroopers were watching the whispered argument between the priest and Druqer. "Didn't you ever wonder what we were doing in the commissar's quarters?"

She realized that she hadn't.

"I told Day he was hoarding a bottle of eight-hundred-ninety-five. Kja just wanted to hurt the prissfaced gak any way she could. You know, that girl knows how to hate better than anyone I've ever known." He smiled, fondly. "But me... I wanted _dirt_."

"Dirt?"

"You know, Notte. Dirty little secrets. Gossip. Everyone has them. Even commissars. Especially commissars, because they aren't supposed to have them."

Eva could feel the ganger breathing as he leaned in close. She almost wished she had been given a penitent's hood. It would have meant she didn't have to see him leering. "He can't let you go to trial. You or any of us. Because if he does someone might find out that the honorable Commissar Druqer keeps love letters and a saucy pict from a married woman in his cogitator."

The world dropped out from under her. "But I didn't."

It all made sense. "I didn't see, I - I didn't know."

This was why no one had listened to a word she'd said. "If he'd-"

All the commissar's rationalizations and leaps of logic.

"Come on, Notte." Grieger's voice was comradely, almost comforting. "It's called a cover-up. Happens all the time. We're just one more casualty of Imperial Justice."

"But I never _saw_ -"

"He can't take that chance, now can he?" Grieger sighed resignedly. "I can't fault him, really. Not like I'd do any different."

Adultery.

She was never going to see her husband again because of a commissar and his adultery.

"This is _not_ over, Druqer!" snapped Father Newcastle from the other side of the artery. "Eva! Stay strong! The Emperor Protects!"

"Move." growled Druqer, and the troopers pressed them forward again.

They reached the end of the t-section, and Eva saw the newly-erected gallows on the parade ground, with four nooses already dangling from them.

"The Emperor Protects." she whispered, and she didn't believe herself for a moment.

 

*      *      *

 

  
What looked like the entire division had been assembled in the parade ground. They stood at attention, shining cap-badges pinned to mottled white longcoats buttoned over their flak armor, scarves tied at necks under polished helmets. Swords were sheathed and rifles shouldered, the model of Imperial discipline. She saw Lieutenant Valdez, looking up at them with his fists clenched, Newcastle muttering in his ear. She saw Sergeant Koth, his jaw set, hand gripping the pommel of his sword tightly. She saw Dahlia, pale and drawn. She saw Resta, three rows back, knuckles white on the stock of her shotgun.

She saw Jakob Svan, staring at her in open-mouthed horror.

She saw Anton duMar, visibly shaking, the clouds of his breath coming fast and heavy.

She saw the secret ops troopers, clad head to foot in black carapace armor, armed hellguns cable-linked into back-mounted power packs, scanning the mustered PDF.

She was standing before the first gallows. Grieger the second, and Daykis and Kjata were being pushed into place before the third and fourth.

Diamond-Eyes was standing on the far edge of the platform. He had exchanged his bodyglove for his own set of carapace. He was muttering into a micro-bead.

"Check it, and then keep sweeping. We're vulnerable here." A pause, for the reply, and then "I know. We'll be done here in a moment." Another pause. "No, it won't. But it will make it a lot easier."

"The Emperor protects those who protect themselves. Straightedge out."

He looked over his shoulder at Eva, and then folded his arms and stood there, looking ill-at-ease.

Druqer stepped out to the front of the platform and raised a hand. "Soldiers of the Planetary Defense Force!" he said. "Thank you all for assembling here, to watch the Emperor's justice done!" He drew his own sword, an antique Quaseen weapon manufactured in the old style, and pointed it at Eva. "This _criminal_ -" he swept it across the other three, "-and her _minions_ broke into my private quarters the night before last, and attempted to make off with information vital to the security of the Defense Force!" His voice was vigorous and full of conviction.

 _He can't actually believe this_ , Eva thought. _Can he? No one could be this deluded. He must be the greatest actor ever to be born in the Imperium. Drake Waltsmuller be damned._

"I have called you all here today because I wish to illustrate my sincerity. You, as Imperial soldiers, deserve to know that your commissar will fulfill his responsibilities. Any heresy or treachery will be hunted out and punished. You need not fear the malign influence of the Archenemy while I stand watch over this division."

His eyes narrowed. "But you must also understand that when I speak, I do not exaggerate. If you stray, in any way, from the light of the Saint and the God-Emperor, I will know, and I will find you, and punish you."

He turned to the accused. "Let this day be an example of that punishment." He nodded to someone behind Eva, and the stormtrooper started slipping a noose over her neck.

_No no no **no no no no NO NO-**_

"Commissar!!"

Lieutenant Valdez stepped forward, holding his lasgun by the trigger, pointing it towards the ground.

She breathed again.

Along with, and as part of, her natural talent with the blade, Eva was a master at reading body language. Even through his storm-coat and heavy clothing, she saw the commissar tense.

Druqer was always tense, of course, but now he shifted. His reassuring confidence became suspicion, maybe even hostility. He glared at Valdez from beneath the brim of his cap.

"The three soldiers on the left," said the lieutenant, choosing his words with exceptional care, "will be no great loss to the Defense Force, and I can readily believe that the seed of Chaos would take root in them. But the one on the right is one of the most skilled and industrious soldiers in this division, and I will not let her swing without due cause."

There was a very long, pregnant, silence. Druqer did not give any further orders to the stormtroopers standing behind Eva and the others.

Nor did he order them to remove the nooses.

"What 'due cause' do you need, lieutenant, other than the word of an Imperial commissar?" Druqer didn't bother to hide the menace in his voice.

Valdez held his ground. "I would settle for being able to actually speak to a soldier under my command before having her sent to the grinder, commissar. No interview was held, no formal inquiry was conducted. This ... trial ... was the first I, or indeed any of the officers, heard of any sort of action being taken. I am the commanding officer of this base. I believe I should know in advance when soldiers in my division are being executed."

"Just a thought. Sir." He added, acidly. Eva wanted to laugh, but she didn't think she could bring herself to find anything funny about any situation in which she had a noose about her neck.

The commissar scowled for a long few moments. "You have the testimony of one of your soldiers, lieutenant. Trooper Anton duMar. A reliable man."

"Corporal Notte is a reliable woman, sir. And I was ... unconvinced by Trooper duMar's testimony."

"Unconvinced?"

"Of Notte's guilt, sir."

"I as well." added Newcastle.

Valdez was going to win, she realized. There was nothing Druqer could say that would prove her guilt. Why the hell had he assembled everyone like this? He must have known there was no way to convict her.

The commissar sighed, and then pulled out his boltgun and pointed it at Valdez's head.

"Those in the highest authority must always be the most closely watched, for it is within their power to do the most harm should corruption befall them. So it is said in the dictates of the Commissariat."

Everyone on the parade ground stood stock still. A handful of troopers' hands went to their weapons. Jakob Svan was one of them.

Newcastle stepped forward, his face nothing short of livid. "Now see here, commissar!" he roared. "This is a _mockery_ of the Emperor's justice! This woman won you your first combat victory, and now you want to hang her because she arrested some criminals before you could get the glory? _And_ you want to execute her commander for giving a damn about his officers?" He swung his arm out at the assembled troops. "For their sake, these troopers had better try not to fight too well or love the Emperor too much, if this is how you treat your best men!!" He spat in the snow and sneered up at Druqer. "Saint forbid someone actually win a medal, or anything ridiculous like that, or you'll have them flogged to death or strung up on broken swords!"

"And it would be no less than such a heretic - any heretic - deserves!!"

" _She is not a heretic!_ "

Nobody in the ranks spoke up openly. No one dared, but there were murmurs of assent. A vein pulsed in Druqer's neck. "You insist on defending her!" He glared at Eva. "You have done fine work on them, heretic. I thank the Emperor that your treachery was brought to light before it was too late."

"Sir, I will not allow this." Valdez was angry now. "It's wrong. Wrong, for a commissar to ignore protocol and doctrine. Lieutenant Colonel Grand will hear a formal complaint, and Corporal Notte - and the others - will get a proper trial. They will remain in lockup until then, but-"

The bolt round went into the center of Valdez's chest, shredded his uniform, and blew his insides out through his spine. The force of the self-propelled bullet hurled him onto his back and he skidded through the snow into the front line of PDF, leaving a bloody smear behind him.

Nobody moved.

The scariest man in the regiment didn't lower his boltgun. His aim traveled the lines of troopers, aiming the weapon at each one in turn, and lingering on the officers. "Only minutes ago, I told you all that I would bring the might of the Commissariat to bear on heresy and treachery. And that includes sympathizing with heretics. The lieutenant should have listened to me."

Eva had never believed that she was capable of hating someone more than she had hated her father.

"I will brook no further disloyalty. We will proceed with this execution and then you will all return to your duties."

Eva looked desperately at Father Newcastle, but he had fallen to his knees next to Valdez's body and was clasping his aquila in his hands.

Druqer turned on his heel and stepped towards the release lever.

Everything happened at once.

Diamond-Eyes's vox crackled, and his hand flew to his micro-bead. "Say again, say again."

There was a crack of las-fire somewhere.

One of the troopers in the crowd yelled, "Incoming!"

She had never heard it before, so she didn't realize what the high, terrible whistling was until the mortar bomb fell into D-1a block and blew it out from within.

And then the bombs were falling all around them, troopers were screaming, Druqer was yelling into his vox.

The Throne agent pushed the commissar aside, aiming the huge, humming plasma pistol he had pulled from his holster directly at Eva.

A round fell right onto the parade ground and hurled white-clad bodies through the air. More blood joined Valdez's on the snowy ground.

Another hit the gallows.

Eva was hurtling towards the ground, and the world went dark.

*      *      *

 

  
Once, in the dead of winter, the power to the stack had gone down without warning. Holling had been called away to help the tech-priests fix the generatorium. Eva had been left alone in their hab, huddled under every blanket she could find, sure she was freezing to death. The cold had seemed to seep into her limbs until it was inside her very bones.

This was just the same. And every bit as bad. She could even hear the pipes cracking as the water inside them froze.

No. Wait.

That was las-fire.

She opened her eyes. First everything was dark, and then it was white.

She lifted her head out of the snow.

Lasguns sounded from every direction, and under the high-pitched crack of energy weapons she could hear the thudding and banging and booming of a hundred different calibers of autogun, and the clash of blades, and the sound alone made her heart pump a little faster.

She found that she had more range of motion in her arms than she should have. The bomb blast must have damaged or crazed the magnet locks. She pulled, and felt the bracers give, just a bit.

Her arms were stiff from hours in the lockup, but she ignored the ache and wrenched with her shoulder muscles, and the mag-locks came off with a whine of protesting metal.

She shook off the bracers, letting them fall to the ground, and pulled herself up.

She looked around. The platform had been blown apart, and the ground was strewn with splintered wood and broken planks. There were bodies everywhere. PDF troopers, slain by the bombs, their winter longcoats torn and their limbs splayed out at impossible angles.

Two of the fallen nooses were empty, and there was no sign of Grieger or Daykis, but Kjata lay on her back in the snow, still cuffed and noosed. Her eyes were open and blank. There was a pool of blood soaking into the ground under her head. Eva stood and looked at the dead woman for a moment. They had never shared a single word. The shotgun-girl had never been known to speak to anyone other than Grieger, or an officer directly addressing her, and Eva had always wondered why. She stared for a moment, and then turned away.

And froze.

There were three people walking onto the blasted parade ground, starting to pick over the bodies, looting sections of webbing and intact las-weapons.

They were heretics, and one of them was looking at Eva with a predatory grin on his face.

He raised his weapon, a heavy war axe with a toothed blade, and gestured at her. "Shol dvanir. Nva." The other two looked up. A short, heavy man with half his face painted red blinked, and then laughed an ugly, lecherous laugh. "Ghistavk! Scaeklist. Skweht, Avandir?" The first one snorted. "Navaskeen. I int."

"Gods' sakes." muttered the third - in Gothic!

The third was a long-limbed woman with a broken nose and an intricate tattoo of a purple flame on her face. She wore a chain coat, which was the most sophisticated armor Eva had seen on any of the heathens yet. She shook her head, and spoke heavily accented Gothic again. "There are two. One over there. You can both have one. Go, and leave all the best for me. You bistkas."

The short one seemed to find this incredibly funny, and paused to laugh. The one with the axe snorted, and stepped towards Eva, "Run." he said in broken Gothic. "Makes it better." He loosened his belt and grinned hungrily. He had an axe and thick, corded muscles, and she was stiff and weak and unarmed.

She edged backwards towards the nearest body, glancing over her shoulder quickly, trying not to take her eyes off the heretic. He chuckled. "Go. Run."

He thought she was looking for an escape route. He was moving slowly, taking his time, but she knew that if she tried to run he would be on her in seconds.

She needed a weapon.

She reached the body. She had to look at the face twice before she realized it was Drevin Lhent, from D Squad. She liked him. He had a good, logical mind. He had a tactician's instincts that might have seen him into the officer corps one day if not for his lazy streak. He was a dab hand at the regicide board. He had his own glass for when she passed around the spirits at the end of the month. It was stenciled with the number "LXXIV" under a heart and cog.

He always kept a knife in his left boot.

It was tightly laced up. She ripped at the knots with her numb fingers. The heretic's tread crunched in the snow, step by step.

The boot came off. Any second she would feel the axe in her back, or worse.

The knife tumbled out and she snatched it up, spinning it into the reverse grip. She had been taught to knife fight. Her assault driller had considered it a requirement.

A year ago now. She was out of practice. And this thing was barely more than a dagger. Not a proper combat knife at all.

She looked at the leering heretic, and still she was not afraid.

He frowned and moved forward, reaching out to grab the knife out of her hand. She stepped back. His arm went through empty air. He growled, and snatched for her again. She dodged, and this time he cursed in frustration, and made two mistakes. He made the first move, and he swung overhand.

She sidestepped, cleanly to the right, and hooked her arm in at his head.

He stumbled backwards, screaming, reaching up to his face to pull the knife out of his eye. He took one hand off the axe. Eva reached in, grabbing hold of the weapon's long haft and wrenching backwards with all of her strength. 

The axe came free of his grip and she spun it around. It was heavy and poorly balanced; almost a club compared to her beloved longsword. She smashed the haft into his face, and then planted a kick on his chest that threw him onto his back.

She swung it down, like a logger's hatchet. It went into his torso with a hideous wet crack.

The second heretic roared in anger. "You dare!!" he bellowed, and charged at her, pulling a sword out of his belt. She spread her stance and shifted her fingers up and down the haft, weighing the heavy weapon in her hands, trying to find the right grip as she pulled it back. She took a deep breath.

As he lunged she stepped to the side and swung. The axe-blade cracked across his head. She felt his skull fracture under the unfamiliar weapon. Blood sprayed through the air. Heat spread up her arms. Blood-heat, surging through her veins, warming her frozen limbs and sending beautiful tremors up her spine and along her nerves.

The woman in the chain coat lifted a lasrifle off one of the dead troopers and pointed it at her. Eva pushed the dying man aside and threw herself at the woman. She pulled the trigger.

The damaged lasgun's power cell exploded. The heretic staggered back, clawing at her head, trying to scream through the cooked meat that was her face.

Eva hacked into her torso, shattering mail and breaking bone, and she fell, her blood steaming on the snow. She opened her mouth, but no sound came out.

She left the axe lodged in the woman's body and stood there, watching her twitch and bleed to death on the ground. Her hands reached towards Eva pleadingly. Her mouth made little wordless gasps.

 _End it_ , she was saying. _You have won._

She could have done it quickly. Take out the axe. Bring it down on her neck, like she had for the giant on the hillside. She could show mercy, and she thought the woman's eyes might shine with gratitude, the way his had.

She could have, but she didn't.

 

*      *      *

  
She checked the dead.

She knew a few of the fallen assaults, but there was no sign of Koth or Dahlia or Kyndi or Resta. Nor Sergeant Yannic or Corporal duVray.

She had to move on. She took a sword and a pair of boots from a dead infantryman, and buckled on a flak jacket and white longcoat. She had to go without a gun; after what had happened to the heretic she didn't trust any of the las-weapons scattered over the ground to fire without overloading into her face.

She looked back the way they had come, towards the chapel, but there was a ferocious firefight raging along the intersection, and she couldn't even make it off the parade ground.

There was the west avenue out of the plaza, which would lead her to the Munitorum depot, and the armory. There were all the weapons she would ever need, but either the defenders or the heretics had almost certainly secured or looted it already.

But a little to the east of there, through the heavy gunners' barracks, was the lockup compound. There wouldn't be anyone there. There was nothing to loot, nothing to defend.

And her wargear would be there.

Her sword.

 

*      *      * 

 

The mortar bombs were still falling as she left the plaza, and she knew that staying in the open for any length of time would see her dead.

She climbed the barriers enclosing the parade ground, into the alleys behind the heavy gunners' barracks. The blocks were full of marauding heretics, looting the sleeping quarters and slaughtering anyone who remained. The enemy was everywhere. Somewhere at the end of the avenue at least a dozen lasrifles were banging out a hail of blue-white suppressive fire down G and H blocks, blasting holes in the walls and killing anyone that tried to cross the main thoroughfare. The lane was strewn with corpses, the result of what must have been several massed charges of heretic fighters at the fortified riflemen up ahead.

Eva stayed low, poking her head out into the alleys before crossing them, looking for fallen equipment or soldiers, or even an armed enemy she could ambush. She made it through three blocks, all the way to H1-a.

When she got to H1-b, she peered around the corner, and a heretic was looking right at her.

He immediately leveled a gun at her. Auto-fire hammered out of the alley and she hastily threw herself back. The man advanced, firing his autogun as he came. She was pinned. She backed away, one hand on her sword, looking frantically for a way out.

Straight back would leave her in his line of fire, and probably take her into even more of the enemy. She could go into the previous alley, but that lead nowhere but into the rifle killzone.

She ducked into it anyway. Maybe she could surprise him as he came around the corner.

Then she saw that the weatherproof paneling over H2-a's window had been shot out.

She lifted herself through the window, praying that the block was empty.

It wasn't. There were heretics, five or six of them, gathered in the center of the room, crouching and clutching weapons, growling at one another in the guttural, alien language her would-be assailants had used.

Even as they turned towards her she was rolling to her feet, sprinting towards the opposite window. It was intact, and she reared back on one foot.

Desperation gave her strength, and her savage kick cracked the weather-sealed plastek. She rammed her shoulder into it and broke the entire assembly free. Eva tumbled out of the window, landing in a pile of broken plastek and wood splinters.

The entire maneuver had taken about five seconds, and she got to her feet and surged around the corner, directly behind the heretic with the autogun. She took her sword in both hands and leaned her body forward, and plunged it into his back.

She felt the weapon transfix his spine. It crunched and popped and her nerves sang with joy. His legs went limp and he fell to the ground, even as he cursed and howled in pain and surprise. She pulled out the blade and forced him down with her boot, and sliced into his arm. The meat parted and the limb came away below the shoulder.

As he died from shock and blood loss, Eva was prying his weapon from dead fingers. It was an auto-stub, a big one, halfway to a small rifle, with a foregrip under the barrel and a long, thin rail of a clip protruding from the handgrip. She lifted it, and rose to face the gang of heretics storming out of the barrack at her.

They were enraged, bellowing and hurling oaths at her. They lifted their weapons and charged, but she had already started to fire.

She'd never actually shot a solid-ammo weapon before. The gun kicked like an auroch, and she blasted a dozen holes in the barrack to her left. She adjusted, grabbing the foregrip and pulling the barrel down, and fired again. The auto gave out a wild clattering machine noise, like a belt conveyor back at the manufactorum, and ripped through the front ranks of the enemy.

A screaming berzerker with a long polearm went down first, the bullets holing his iron chestplate and punching into his helm. Then a huge bastard with a heavy helmet and a long topknot, holding a greatsword over his head. He died with five bullets in him, and fought for every second until his heart stopped beating. A woman in a stolen Volunteers longcoat smacked into the snow face first with one knee bent the wrong way. A snarling monster with a metal mask went for a gun of his own, but a bullet shattered his gorget and dropped him to his knees, choking.

The auto-fire stopped. The gun clicked empty and useless. She dropped it and drew her sword, turning the draw into a block to meet the fifth heretic's war axe. They pushed against one another's blades, grappling for one second, two, and then Eva kicked him in the groin so she could leap away from the swinging mace of the sixth man.

She landed a diagonal slash on the axeman, slicing a furrow in his leather armor and drawing blood. He looked bemused, and brought up his axe to deflect her next two strikes, and then she had to dodge as the man with the mace came in again. It was a vicious thing, the size of a cooking pot, studded with a series of thick spikes. It came down again - overhand! - and she twisted her wrist in a perfect parry.

The impact almost broke her arm. Her sword went spinning away and hit the wall of the barrack. She barely stopped herself from toppling over. The maceman was grinning. "Skulls for the Skull Throne." he rasped.

The other one laughed. "You _bistka_." He shouldered his comrade aside and swung at her.

"You disarmed me." Eva twisted away from the falling mace, her arm snapping out to snatch up her weapon. As the heretic came in again she was kicking off the wall. The mace ripped through the air where she had been only a second ago and shattered the planking, but she was already stepping to his right. "You can't do that!" she yelled, pulling back her weapon in both hands. She ducked the brutal punch that swung for her head, and then rammed her sword up under his armpit.

His arm came away as she tore the blade out, and he staggered back, roaring in pain, blood pouring out from under his ragged shoulder armor. The axeman bellowed in rage and leapt at her. She slid around the falling axe, laughing out loud at the heavy, telegraphed blow, and went into a spin. She lifted her foot, and her heel crashed into his face.

He went down with a crack and a burst of blood. She saw broken teeth flying through the air. The other one was coming back, holding his mace in his off hand. He was covered in his own blood. Spittle ran out from between his teeth as he cursed at her. "Kill me. Kill me. I cannot be defeated. I serve the Blood God. No defeat. Only victory and death." Her first blow glanced off his armor. " _Scae Khorne ruujovk. Avorostr sveo-_ "

The second sliced through his throat, and he stumbled, choking on the last few words of his maniacal rantings. "Shut up." she gasped. "Shut up, _shut up, SHUT UP!_ " One of those things he'd said, one of those heathen words, what the hell had that been? The sound made her ears ring, churned her gut and heated her blood. It made her want to murder someone, want to _take skulls_...

Eva was so unmanned by the blasphemy that she almost didn't notice the axeman behind her. Had he not been all but blinded by her brutal kick he would have cloven her head in two.

As it was, the axe hacked through her coat, her vest, and her leather harness and scored a line of pain down her back.

The first thought that came into her head was that it was the exact opposite of the beautiful warmth that came from killing. It was cold, it was ice, it was the chill of death.

The second thought was that anyone who _dared_ to inflict such a horrible sensation on her deserved to die.

She cut into him, ruthlessly, savagely, hacking and slashing again and again and again until she'd lost count of how many cuts she'd made, and his body slumped to the ground, an unrecognizable lump of bloody scars.

The cut he'd made stung. She was sure it couldn't be a very deep cut, but it hurt, and the cold breeze bit at it and made it hurt even more. Her armor was pressing painfully on the small of her back - it must have been damaged by the blow.

 _I need to get to the lockup,_ she thought as she retrieved the auto-stub. She needed her wargear - though at least she had a gun. A gun she quite liked, even if it did have the Emperor's own recoil problem. She'd have been overwhelmed for sure if not for this thing.

She paused, and realized that in the last minute or so she'd killed seven people.

Adding the three in the parade ground, that made fourteen she'd killed. In two days.

And she was enjoying it.

Why? Was Resta right? Was her ... bloodlust ... a gift from the Emperor? Did the Emperor _give_ gifts like that?

"And if You can do things like this to me," she said under her breath. "why didn't You answer my prayers?"

She sat down behind the barrack and placed her sword across her knees, and shivered. It was cold, and she needed a hat, and nothing made sense when she wasn't fighting. She wondered if Father Newcastle was still alive. She hadn't seen his body on the parade ground.

She wanted to talk to Holling. He had faith. Real faith. He would have the answer, she was sure.

But she was sitting in the middle of a burning PDF base, with miles of flatland between her and the city. There were heretics everywhere, and she supposed _she_ was a wanted heretic to the Imperium now. "Nothing about this situation in the Uplifting Primer." she muttered. "The gak do I do now, lay down and die?"

Behind her, dozens of voices bellowed and screamed, and she heard the gunfire from both sides redouble in intensity. She scrambled up and looked around the corner.

A woman was striding up the thoroughfare. Her armor was black and head to foot, but not black like the stormtroopers' carapace. It was pitch-black, ink-black, night-with-no-moon black, as though all light vanished into it. Rifles were screaming and cracking over one another, spearing her with beam after beam of las-fire, but she calmly strode through the barrage, a flail swinging lazily at her side. The las-rounds just sank into her black armor and dissipated.

And then she was in motion, swinging the flail and going into a sprint. There was a crash of wood and the las-fire stopped. The heretics at the other end of the thoroughfare roared in triumph, and the street filled with charging warriors.

 _No_ , she thought. _Never say die. The depot is just past this block. Get past the street in the confusion. Get into the depot. Find the lockup. Find my wargear. Get clear of the base. Then..._

_One thing at a time._

She retrieved more clips for the auto-stub from the body of its previous owner. They were long, heavy, rail-like things, the length of her forearm, that she had to slide carefully into the grip to avoid jamming the gun again. She pulled back the slide, fired a round into the wall to make sure she had done it correctly, loosened her sword in its sheath, and took off down the alley.


	6. Act I, Chapter Five: The Price

She came out of the alley right across the rear of the mob of charging heretics.

She'd chosen her moment well. The last few into the charge were putting away ranged weapons - auto-stubs, pistols, and long-guns - and drawing blades as they followed the berserkers in.

Bull through. That was her plan. Push through the horde. Act like she was supposed to be there. There were quite a few heretics in stolen white coats. She had a sword and the machine pistol, and she looked like she belonged on a battlefield.

Almost instantly she was pushed forward by the press of bodies, all crowding towards the barricade at the end of the street. It was unbelievable how  _hot_  it was, running through the snow surrounded by raging, frothing, sweating men and women. And loud, all of them, screaming blasphemies in her ears. They were moving,  _fast_. Hundred-meter charge uphill fast. She was being carried forward by the impetus of the charge. 

She had always wanted to charge with her friends, her comrades. Now she never would. Druqer had seen to that.

Eva forced her way out of the press, taking her elbows and boots to the mob when she couldn't get past them. No one really cared. It almost seemed expected. She saw one heretic lose his footing and go down. The horde trampled him, and he dissapeared without a sound. They were too focused, too eager to reach their foes.

Clouds of dust and powder leapt into the air and hurled the first rank of assaulters to the ground as the PDF troopers threw grenades to buy themselves breathing room. Between the shoulders of the men in front of her Eva could see the woman in the black armor, surrounded by white-clad figures, laying about with the long weighted chain.

She made it into the last alley, between I2-a and I3-a, just in time, as the assault wave behind her crashed into the barricade. She hit the wall of the block and stumbled. The wound on her back ached and stung, driving her to her knees.

" ** _Yhastur unt jhor?!_** " A voice behind her snarled. It was a big, scarred specimen with a fecking  _chainaxe_  on his shoulder. He was glaring at her. He kept shouting that guttural language, and she could not in her life have understood the words, but she knew what he was saying. _Who are you? You aren't supposed to be here_.  
  
She lifted the autostub and shot him. He growled, more in surprise than anything, as the bullet drew blood on his breast. Then his eyes narrowed, and she saw anger on his face.  **"Blood for the Blood God!** " He shouted, and broke into a run, and she squeezed the trigger. The shrieking clatter of her machine gun was drowned by the roar of the motorized axe, but he staggered, both of his knees blown out, and slumped to the ground, dead. The axe kept growling, his dead fingers still holding down the activation stud.

Her gun clicked empty. It had taken the entire magazine to bring the heretic down.

She pulled back the slide. The autogun had ferocious power but it took so long to reload. Release the slide, take the clip out, put the new one in, pull back the slide. It was a bloody four-step process. Make that five, because she wasn't wearing any webbing and had to dig in the pockets of her longcoat for reloads. With a laspistol it was swap out, swap in, and the toggle to release the spent charge pack was built into the grip. You never needed to let go of a Mk VX.

But the laspistol wouldn't have saved her here. Not unless every single shot was a headshot, she suspected.

 _It's a lesson_ , Eva thought as she worked the next clip into the gun.  _You don't kill these people with precisely-aimed shots from pistols. You kill them by shooting them over and over again or cutting them into pieces._

She could see the compound now. It was a little rectangle of rockcrete sunk most of the way into the earth. Her stomach turned over at the sight of it. She didn't want to go back into that hole in the ground.

It didn't even have a proper door; just a hatch set into the wall at an angle like the entrance to a storm cellar. The Imperium didn't waste anything on heretics. She felt her anger well up again, chasing away the cold fear, and she ran faster. Her wargear was in that lockup, and she was not afraid of  _anything_  when it enclosed her.

There was a crash of splintering wood and the woman in the black armor smashed through the fence next to her. The spiked weight was already swinging above her head and as she hit the ground she let out the full length of the chain. 

Eva threw herself prone. The chain whickered over her head. She looked up and saw the warrior adjust her grip, changing the angle of the flail's orbit. It made one rotation, at which point she had gotten the autostub up in front of her. On the second rotation it made a perfect vertical arc, right on top of her. Eva rolled. The metal head powdered the ground next to her. Eva landed back on her stomach, and, all but overcome with frustration, roared, "You-" She grabbed the foregrip, "-are in."

"My!"

" **WAY!** "

Bullets streamed forth from the machine-gun's barrel. Eva didn't really expect them to do much more than irritate the warrior or slow her down, give her time to recover and get close with her blade. The woman had shrugged off fire from a dozen lasguns, ignored enough killing power to put down a combat servitor or blast through a plascrete wall.

The hard rounds slammed into her armor and  _shattered_  it. The warrior howled in pain as tiny fragments of black metal flew through the air, stark against the snow. 

Eva got to her feet, already moving as her blade left her hip. The woman's helm met her burning eyes, and she pulled a knife from a thigh sheath.

Eva smashed through her guard as though she had never even raised her hand. She hacked through the brittle black armor - it cracked like glass under her blade - and cut through the woman's arm. It was thin, but lined with corded, ropey muscle, like a particularly gamey piece of meat, and she put all her weight into the blow and her sword sheared through the arm and dropped it to the ground.

The warrior let out a horrible shriek through her helm and drove her knee into Eva's stomach. She heard her vest crack as she stumbled backwards. The woman stared at her for a moment, blood pouring from the stump of her arm. How was she still standing?

" _ **Who ... are you, corpse-lover?**_ " she gasped. " _ **Who are you ... to kill me?**_ "

Eva stepped forward, taking her weapon in both hands. "Evangeline Notte," she said. "Who are you, that I'm killing?" 

" _ **Nhai Scaeklist**_." 

"Quite a name." said Eva, and hacked the warrior's head from her shoulders.

 _Sixteen_ , she counted.

 

  
*        *       *

 

There had been fighting around the lockup.

The reinforced gate to the compound had been blown in. The bodies of five heretics were scattered in the snow. Four were las-burned, and the last lay in a puddle of red snow next to the storm-hatch, his throat cut. A PDF trooper she didn't recognize was spread-eagled on the ground, shot full of holes by a stub gun.

The hatch into the lockup was closed, but not locked.

She hastily pulled it open. Was someone inside? Had some of the defenders retreated here, and been forced to leave one of their number behind?

She closed the hatch behind her, sighing audibly at relief from the cold. There wasn't much in the way of a heating system in the lockup (she knew that all too well) but it was something, and atleast there wasn't any wind.

Almost immediately she knew she wasn't alone. She could hear people moving and talking on the edge of her hearing, probably in the guards' office. She cursed under her breath. If she could find a helmet and a sand scarf she could pass herself off as just another trooper, and she wouldn't have to worry about avoiding other defenders. She crouched there on the doorstep for a moment, thinking.

The guards' office was on the upper level, and the evidence locker must be here too - they wouldn't store sensitive items down in the cells near the prisoners. Could she sneak past the people in the office? It wouldn't matter. The evidence locker would be behind the guards' office anyway.

Maybe she could reason with them - she was pretty sure they were Imperial, and if there was even a single one that she knew... They were hiding down here, weren't they? The heretics were rampaging, killing everyone. The defenders needed every able body they could find. Eva was an excellent soldier - even the heavy gunner corps knew that. She'd be able to convince them she was worth keeping around. Maybe if they made it out of this alive, and enough troopers weighed in on her side, things might be different when the commissars heard her case...

And then she heard a woman cry out in pain, and it was Dahlia, and then she was sprinting forward. The door to the office was shut, and Eva threw it open and burst into the room.

A 1st Assault trooper was propped up against the wall, dead, with a blade wound on his forehead. 

Grieger sat at the desk, facing towards the door, leaning back in his chair and chewing on his ever-present worrywheat.

On the floor behind him, Dahlia was laid out on her back. She wore an undershirt and nothing more, and Daykis was bent over her, his pants around his ankles, one hand restraining her blade arm, the other gripping her by the head.

Eva saw all of this. She saw Grieger's eyes bulge at the sight of her. Saw his hand traverse the desk and take hold of the knife sitting on the corner.

The rest of the room had gone gray and indistinct, like a worn old vid recording. The only things that were clear to her were the two men, and the color of their skin and clothing and eyes was more vivid than anything she could ever remember seeing.

Grieger leaned forward and threw the knife.

She dove to the side and it clattered off the wall. She recovered and leapt forward, her blade aimed at Grieger's throat, but even as she mantled the desk he had pushed off, hard. The chair, with him in it, dropped to the floor, and his legs kicked up and cold-cocked her right under the jaw.

There was an instant of unbelievable pain, a shock that echoed in her brain and made stars burst behind her eyes, and then Eva was on the floor. Her ears were filled with a ringing noise that blotted out all other sound.

She got to one knee and righted herself, and Grieger's second knife buried itself in her chest. It punched through her coat and wedged in her battered flak vest, and she stepped towards him again. She didn't yell. She didn't say anything. She was beyond words, and her countenance was wrath.

He had one more knife ready for her, and it flashed in his hand, darting and stabbing, threatening to slip through her guard and strike her vulnerable arms or head. 

Daykis threw himself at her, having pulled on a pair of assault gloves (as well as his pants). He was holding a short sword, clearly looted from one of the heretics, and he came in low, aiming to drive it up under her ribs.

She dodged backwards but Grieger was on her, slicing and stabbing with the knife. Daykis shifted right, moving to surround her and pin her in the corner. The two were a well-oiled street-fighting machine. They were actually going to kill her if she wasn't careful.

_Duck the knife. Two diagonal blows on Grieger. Grieger moves back. Switch to Daykis. Slash. Slash. Slash. Sword blows ringing off his metal gloves. The world is gray and dull, unimportant, and only she and her opponent are real._

_He parries and comes in. The blow is capable of demolishing her if it connects but she's not there when it lands. She's already moving between the two of them. Her knee goes into Grieger's stomach and he doubles over. She spins back around to meet Daykis._

_She's ready for him, and her blade flashes out and catches his at the height of its arc, knocking it aside, and as his fouled blow goes wide she pulls the throwing knife out of her chest armor, steps forward, and plunges it into his throat._

_He reaches up and fumbles with the knife for a moment, and then her foot slams into his chest and throws him into the desk with a sickening crack. He gasps, and reaches up towards his neck again, and then lies still._

_Seventeen-_

And then Grieger knifed her from behind, punching his dagger through her vest and spilling her blood.

Pain crawled up her back and bit into her brain, cold and terrible. She screamed and spun around, cracking him across the face with the back of her hand. " **No!** " she cried, enraged. " **That kill was _perfect_ , and you RUINED IT!!**"

She threw him into the corner, and stalked towards him, sword hanging at her side. "You're not going to ruin anything else. Now you _die_."

He gave a weak little chuckle as she raised the sword above her head. "Too good to last."

"What?" 

"Borrowed time, Notte. That's all this was. Got another year out of it, too." 

"What?!" she snapped.

"That was the deal, Notte!" He kept laughing. She wanted him to stop _laughing_. She wanted him to be in _pain_. 

"Men like me, and Day, this is a good deal for us. We get another chance instead of a marshal's cell, and a shot to 'earn the Emperor's forgiveness with our blood.'"

He shook his head. "Not how it works. I got caught. I got sent to the grinder." He shrugged. "Emperor's already got a special place in hell picked out for me. I was ready to die. Then this came along and I figured, why not."

And he smiled. "But when you've already decided you're ready to stop living ... life just doesn't mean so much anymore. That is..." he grinned, "until you came along. Gakking you around... the look on your face up on that gallows ... well, that made it all worthwhile. Thanks, Notte. Thanks for making life worth living!!"

And he laughed, and laughed, and he kept laughing until Eva stepped forward and kicked him, hard. "You don't get to die." she whispered. "Not yet."

 

*        *       *

 

Eva took the medkit down from the wall and rushed to Dahlia's side. The younger woman was semiconscious, passing out every few moments from pain. "Hey. Hey. Come on, Dahlia. Dahlia, my girl, stay with me."

Her eyes opened and she focused on Eva. "What happened?" 

"Jumped me..." she mumbled. "Knocked me out. Brought me here." 

Eva swore, foully. She wasn't a corpsman. She wasn't a medicae. She didn't know what to do. "Beat me up..." Dahlia said. "Think he broke some things. Inside." 

"Okay. Okay." Eva said. "There's people still alive out there. We're going to find you a medic, okay? Doc Giles'll figure you out." 

"He still alive?"

"Yeah. Yeah. Sure. Koth wouldn't let anything happen to him, you know that. Just you give me a moment, got to get my wargear, then tie something up, and then we'll get out of here, alright?" Dahlia nodded, weakly, and Eva propped her up against the wall, dosed her with a stimm from the medkit, and turned away.

She went into the back room with the medkit, and unhooked her flak vest. Pain flared as she stretched her dorsal muscles. The vest had been _mangled_ ; first broken inwards by the heretic's axe, then caved in by Nhai Scaeklist's armored knee, and then further compromised by Grieger's well-aimed backstab. It was practically a miracle that the armor had held together at all, and not broken away from behind.

Blood dripped from the long score in her back as she pulled the vest off and she felt a deep, pervasive revulsion at the sight. She wasn't supposed to bleed. She was meant to spill the blood of others.

She sprayed synthskin from the kit onto the wound, and then wrapped bandages around her waist until there was enough coverage for her to seal it with tape.

She was careful not to use too much. She had more important uses for the medical supplies.

Once she was satisfied she took up her autogun and shot the lock off the evidence locker, and when she came back out into the office it was her sword, her _real_ sword, the one she had learned to fight with, swinging in her grip.

Then she strode over to Grieger and cut his hand off.

Blood spilled onto the ground and he roared in pain. "Oy! OY! Notte, slow down!" "

That's exactly what I'm doing." she said, and fired a needle of blood thickener into his forearm.

"Trying to keep me alive, Notte?" he gasped through the pain. 

"It was quick for Daykis. He didn't _deserve_ quick." She sprayed the bleeding stump, and then wrapped it and pulled the bandages tight until he squealed. "So this is going to be slow. You're so eager to die, Jans? Then you don't get to, not until you are _begging_ -" she cut off his other hand- "and _screaming_ " - he howled and cried and banged his head against the wall as she treated and sealed that, too - "and _praying_ for it, and there will be no one here to give it to you."

Then she took his left foot, sawing it off with the long, sturdy edge of her longsword, and then his right, and she bound them both so that he looked like some kind of macabre doll with his limbs mummified, haunting an empty room in a dead house, and she kept pumping him full of coagulant until she thought his blood must be turning to sludge inside him.

And his screams as his mutilated body tried to die, but couldn't, were as haunting as she had ever heard. 

Grimacing in satisfaction, Eva turned away, and saw Dahlia, her eyes wide, staring awestruck at Grieger. "He deserves it." said Eva, and her friend looked at her, and then nodded, slowly. 

"Yeah."

_That's my girl._

 

*        *       *

 

She'd been trying not to hope she would find it, but still she dug through the evidence with unseemly haste, until she saw the glint of silver under her uniform top. Her locket's chain was still broken, but she stowed it safely in her pocket. She would get it mended as soon as possible.

If she lived that long.

She suited up.

All of her armor was there, but her clothing and laspistol had been disposed of. It wasn't too great a loss. She wouldn't have tried wearing the singlet over her bandages anyway, and as far as the gun went, she had the auto-stub, and two clips remaining for it.

She'd survive.

Dahlia's gear had been piled in a corner after the malcontents' assault on her. Eva helped her back into her leggings and top, but Dahlia asked her not to put her heavy armor on without knowing just how bad her internal injuries were. If they buckled on a suit of flak netting it might push one of her ribs into her lungs or something. Eva agreed, and Dahlia pulled on her boots and heavy coat. "Can I use your goggles?" Eva asked. She'd forgotten that her own had been destroyed when she was arrested. Dahlia nodded, and with that Eva was fully armored, and ready for any challenge.

When they left, Grieger was curled up in the corner, whimpering feebly, overwhelmed by the pain, hoarsely begging Eva to finish him off.

She didn't even look at him.

 _What does it mean?_ she thought. _The priest told me that it was natural to want to kill heretics. But he wasn't a heretic. He was just a criminal, and an idiot. Druqer's not a heretic either, and I want to kill him so badly it's making my hands shake._

_What does it mean?_

"How bad is it out there?" asked Dahlia as she limped up to the hatch, one arm over Eva's shoulders. Eva carried her sword in her free hand, relishing the feel of it in her grip once again. 

"Bad." said Eva. "They've completely broken through the perimeter. And the bombardment hasn't stopped."

"Who's left?" 

"I think someone's defending the chapel. There was a strongpoint up near H block, but most like they're all dead. They got overrun just as I went through." 

Dahlia swore. "We better live through this. I want to see the commissar thrown out and shot." 

She looked at Eva. "He assembled the whole division for the execution. We were supposed to be on a war footing. We knew they were out there, and he pulled almost everyone off the perimeter to watch you hang." 

"How many did he leave on watch?"

"Maybe twenty-five."

"Twenty-five?! Two bloody squads to hold a whole perimeter?! Is he stupid as well as mad?" 

"I don't know."

Eva pushed the hatch open and reached out a hand to pull Dahlia through. "Come on, my girl. Up you get." 

"Eva..." she said, quietly. "I..." 

"Dahl?"

"Eva, if you hadn't come at exactly that moment ... he would have ... they ... thank you." 

"Dahlia. You're my girl. You'd have done the same." She took her arm and hoisted her up. "At least I sure bloody hope so."

Neither of them laughed.

The fighting hadn't died down, but now, from this vantage, Eva could see the supply depot at the center of the base.

There were figures standing on its roof, figures in white with lasguns, blasting away at targets in the streets below. And the Valkyrie, the Throne agents' black gunship, was in the air, hovering over the streets, firing the heavy guns in its nose and wings.

"Dahlia, you see that?! The landing pad! They're holding out!" 

"Not ... not that far away, right?" 

"No. Just a street. Just ... two streets. We can make it."

 

*        *       *

 

They set off. One dogged step at a time, they marched.

A heretic came screaming out of a side alley waving a broadsword and Eva put him down with a wild burst from the autostub. He hadn't thought to use the looted laspistol tucked into his belt, and she gave it to Dahlia, who clutched it tightly to her chest with her free hand.

A gang of attackers with stolen las-weapons drove them away from a barrack block that lay in their path, and then the gunship flattened it with a missile and a volley of bolter fire, and they had to go wide to avoid the burning wreckage.

Growling enemies burst out of every corner and every shadow, and Eva and Dahlia shot them down.

Dahlia's breathing was labored, and there was more blood at the corner of her mouth as they made it to the gates of the Munitorum depot. The building was surrounded. Every street and structure surrounding it was full of heretics, taking punishing fire from the Imperial riflemen on the depot roof and the gunship above, but still they came, drawn by the promise of violence, crowding into the Imperial killzones as though they couldn't wait to die.

_Maybe they can't. Blood for the Blood God._

And she and Dahlia had to go through them.

They made it to an equipment shed, right between them and the depot. She could hear war cries and gunfire inside. "Dahlia, my girl, you with me?" she said. 

"Y-yeah." 

"Trooper!" Eva switched to her officer's voice. "You with me?" 

"Y-yes! Yes, I'm okay." 

"No, you're not. Can you walk?" 

"...really bad idea. Yeah, I think so. For a little ways." 

"Right. I'm going to go in here, and I'm going to kill every piece of heretic shit inside, and you're going to follow me. You have a gun. Defend yourself, and don't shoot me, okay?" 

"Okay."

She set Dahlia down and helped her stand. The younger woman swallowed and held her pistol up. "You made it off that ridge, my girl. You can make it through this." 

"It hurts." 

"Yes, it does. But I can't leave you out here. Just follow me in, and fall down in the corner. You'll be fine, alright?"

"A-alright." 

"Ten steps, trooper. Ten steps, Dahlia. You can make it."

She kicked the door down.

The machine pistol was deafening in the close confines, and three of them were dead before they knew what was happening. A single las-round flashed out from behind her and blew off a heretic's arm as he tried to shoot Eva with his long-gun. Then Eva was sweeping the gun's barrel up and over, destroying two more foes who pulled guns on her, and a sixth who drew a blade and attempted to charge.

 _Thirty_.

The stream of bullets stopped and the auto clicked at her. Eva fancied that the gun sounded _frustrated_ that it could no longer deal death.

Eva sympathized.

Her sword came free of the sheath and she slashed it across the throat of the seventh man that got in her way. Choking and gasping, he kept hitting her, and she just pulled him into a blade lock and watched him expire as they stared into each other's eyes.

A hard round thudded into her chest armor. A las-shot cracked her pauldron. They swarmed over her, brandishing daggers and hatchets and wicked hammers.

She saw them coming, each of them in turn, eight of them at once, and she saw, clearly, that as each blow came she would have time to evade it. She knew exactly the way in which to move, the order in which to strike.

Parry high. Dodge left. Thrust. _Thirty-two_. Block with gauntlet. Snap kick. (Duck throwing knife.) Slash high. _Thirty-three_.

High kick, aimed at head. Strike low, take legs out from under him. Place foot on neck. (Block with gauntlet.) Press down. _Thirty-four_.

Backhand. Thrust. Duck. Parry. Slash. _Thirty-five_. Grab wrist. Impale. Kick.

Her foot threw the corpse of the man she had just run through into his surviving comrades, knocking some of them down and pushing the rest back. _Thirty-six_. She finished one while he was down. _Thirty-seven_. Another grabbed her ankle and threw her into the wall. The last had risen to one knee, and pulled an auto-stub on her.

Dahlia's las-round punched a hole clean through his chest. Eva got back to her feet and threw herself at the last surviving man, and put him down with four blows.

She could hear bellowing and war cries outside, and she sprinted to Dahlia and pulled her up. "Come on!" she shouted. 

"Eva," said Dahlia. She was slumped low, her eyes were unfocused, and there was blood leaking out of her mouth again.

A monstrous sound filled their ears as the gunship came overhead. The heavy guns nestled under its wings boomed, an incomprehensibly loud burst of pure _noise_ , and the enemy outside were silenced in moments. Eva pulled her friend back onto her shoulder and stormed ahead, making for the depot entrance.

They clambered over the bodies of dozens of slaughtered heretics, almost losing their footing more than once, until Eva made it to the blasted-open front door.. "Don't shoot! Defense Force!" she yelled as she stumbled over the threshold. 

A squad's worth of lasguns and a stubber's muzzle were leveled at their chests and just as quickly pulled away. "I've got injured here!" 

"Survivors!" shouted an officer. "Get the stairs open!

Someone scrambled over to the door to the roof and started pulling it open. "Is that Dahlia Brunsdottir?" he called down. 

"Aye!" said Eva. "Please, is there a medicae-" 

"Don't worry." said the officer. "Rhee and Cinnie are up there. Saved a few already."

Eva refrained from asking about Doc Giles.

"Come on, I'll help you." said the trooper. He took Dahlia under the other shoulder, and they climbed the stairs to the roof, the girl wincing and shouting in pain with every few steps.

"What company you two?" grunted the trooper. 

Eva paused. 

"1st Assault."

He whistled. "Damn. Nice. Gakking crime about Eva Notte."

She swallowed, cursing her accent, not for the first time, and hoping that the muffling scarf would be enough to hide it. "Aye. It was."

He growled. "Didn't deserve to die that way." 

"She was a tough bitch. How do you know she's dead?" 

He shook his head. "I was in the second row when the attack hit. Mortar blew up the gallows and everyone on it. No way any of them survived that."

Then Druqer and the Throne agent were dead?

...how had _she_ survived?

Before she could ask the doors to the landing pad were pulled open. "Move it!" shouted Sergeant Koth, and four pairs of hands pulled them inside. The sergeant swore. "Brunsdottir, is she-" 

"She's hurt - she's been-" Eva tried to say, but two more men had already taken Dahlia by the arms and legs and carried her away, shouting for a medic. Eva looked over the rooftop. There were an even thirty men, three whole squads, maybe more, deployed around the edges of the depot roof, loosing las-shots at the swarming heretics below. Off to the right, looking out over the thoroughfare, the stubber started up again - they'd saved at least one more heavy support weapon. 

"Glad you survived." Koth was saying. "We need every body we can get, Trooper...?"

Before she could think of a reply the gunship screamed overhead on another strafing run. The heretics below hurled bombs and rocket grenades up at it, but its wing mounts came to life and blitzed the street with cannon fire.

_We have a chance. If not to win, then to survive, as long as the ammunition holds out. And if it doesn't, we have the high ground, and blades, and good men and women to wield them. We have a gakking chance!_

And then she saw Druqer walking towards her, bellowing at the officers and worrying at a bandaged cut on his cheek.

Something broke inside her.

Eva, sentenced to death for possibly seeing something she hadn't even known existed.

Dahlia, beaten and violated on the floor of a prison office.

Lhent and Nellorie and Zynd dead. Kyndi and Resta and all the others missing. Throne only knew how many good soldiers slaughtered in the streets below. Valdez, who had only wanted to get as many of his people through this war alive as possible. 

And this arrogant shit had escaped with a bandaged cheek.

She was moving towards him.

"Corporal, get this woman a rifle!" he was shouting. "You, trooper, what is your name?"

His features were so beautifully defined. It was as though she were watching a vid and Druqer had been filmed in a much higher quality, so his image leapt off the screen at her. Everything else, Koth and the other troopers, eventhe las-rounds and falling bombs, seemed plain and far away.

Druqer was the only thing that mattered.

Her sword came free of its sheath. "Trooper?" He went for his gun. "Trooper, identify yourself!!"

The bolt pistol came up, and her boot was there to meet it. The gun went off and the shot went over her shoulder. She could feel the propellant singe her cheek.

The pistol clattered to the ground. "You know who I am." she said, and leapt at him. 

He managed to avoid her first swing, and got his sabre out in time to parry the second, but the third strike was a mighty thrust that punched through his jacket and left him winded and bleeding. "Eva?! Eva, what the hell are you doing?!" Koth was shouting, but she didn't care. 

"Eva!!" cried another voice, Jake Svan's voice, and she felt a pang, but it didn't matter, because vengeance was at hand.

Druqer was strong and fast, but not as fast as her, and he took too long to recover from each blow, and for him defense was simply defense, whereas to her it was the beginning of the next attack.

And his blood was already dripping onto the ground, and each strike came closer and closer to ending him. "Fight back!!" she snarled. Druqer was a monster. He was the terrible daemon that had ruined her life and her career and locked her away and had her hung.

And here she had him under her blade and he couldn't even do her the courtesy of making it good. "Fight back, you motherless Progena shit!!"

She hit him on the shoulder and snapped off his epaulet. "Worthless!" She knocked aside a mis-aimed slash. "Call that swordsmanship?!" An underhand slice cut his nose and knocked off his cap. "What the gak do they teach you in the Schola? Tourney fencing? What _shit!_ "

Parry. Slash to the left shoulder. Backstep. 

Blade lock. Knee between the legs.

Fist to the face. Foot to the ribs. Backhand. Backstep.

Thrust.

He tried to scream, but all that came out was a rattling wheeze. The point had gone into his lung. She grabbed him by the arm and pulled him farther onto the blade. 

He gasped. "Heretic... bloody heretic..." 

"I'm not a heretic." she spat in his face. 

"...have ... killed me..." 

"Oh. Aye, there's that. Well," she whispered, "I suppose I am, at that. And you made me one. 

" _You're not a very good commissar_."

She wanted him to die in despair. She wanted him to realize that this was his doing, and that he had no one to blame for his death but himself.

But as the breath left his body the only thing she saw in his eyes was hate.

And then he died, and slumped against her, and she threw him to the ground in disgust.

"Don't move."

Sergeant Koth's voice was hard and quiet. She looked over her shoulder, and saw the laspistol pointed at her head.

"Don't move, Eva."

"Sergeant, is it really worth it?"

"You just killed a commissar, Eva."

"He was scum. I didn't break into that room, sergeant. You know that."

"It doesn't matter now. _You just killed a commissar, Eva_."

Gunfire crackled and the wind whistled around them. 

"I did, didn't I?"

"You had a chance before, Eva. Not anymore. I'm sorry."

"Let me fight." she said. "You need everyone if you're going to make it through this." 

"If I let you fight you might escape. He was a commissar, Eva. You can't just walk away from that." 

"I walked away from the gallows, sergeant. I'll walk away from you." 

"You can't." 

"I'm not dying here, sergeant. It won't happen."

"You'd fight me? Us?"

It took her a moment to answer. 

"If I have to."

Svan looked like a dead man walking.

"I'm leaving, Koth." she gripped her weapon.

"Fine." he said. "I'm sorry."

The laspistol, set to max charge and aimed straight and true, didn't fire.

The sergeant had just ... stopped. She could see his clenched teeth and bulging eyes, frozen at the terrible moment in which he shot his friend and subordinate.

Only it hadn't happened. It had stopped. Everything had stopped. She turned, slowly, in a circle, and saw the paralyzed faces of her comrades. She saw the las-beams, frozen and shimmering, and the mortar bomb suspended in midair above the far end of the roof. She saw the snowflakes glittering, motionless, in the air all around her, air that had taken on a hazy quality, like she was swimming in oil.

There was a man standing in front of her.

He was there suddenly; he hadn't been there when she had turned around. His face was impassive. A metal staff topped with an ornate star rested at his side, and he was shrouded in a long blue-washed robe woven with silvery chainmail. His face was old and wizened, his sky waxy and discolored. His eyes bored into her. A hideous sensation prickled over her skin and nausea boiled in her stomach, and she took an involuntary step back.

"Hello." he said. There was an edge to his voice, a thick northern accent, but not like the heretics she had fought.

"Wh-who are you?" she all but whispered. 

"I am Dvoran Octavionos."

"You're a heretic." 

His face changed. He smiled, indulgently, like a schoolteacher, and shook his head slowly. "No."

She stared. 

"A heretic," he went on, "believes other than his temple believes. This temple is not mine. This god is a corpse on a throne. "

"But we are not here to talk of me. We are here for you, Scaea Notte."

Somehow, the name still stirred anger in her gut. "Eva."

He raised his eyebrows. "What?"

"My name is _Eva_. Eva Notte. Now what do you want with me?""

His laugh was long and booming and it felt _wrong_ in the total silence. He threw back his head and crowed with mirth until he was short of breath. 

"Ah," he said, an unsettling smile splitting his pale face, "I was right about you."

"Here you stand, facing a master, a magus of the Changer of Ways, one which could unmake you and every other life in this base with my mind alone. It would take only a single thought. There would be nothing left of you to bury. No chronicle would record your passing. Not a man or woman alive would remember your name.

"And _you_ are the one telling _me_ how things are to be."

"So tell me, Eva," he spread his arms wide, "What is it that you want?"

"...what is this?" she said, inclining her head at Sergeant Koth's immobile form. 

"I have given you time to consider your future." 

"This is ... sorcery. Witchcraft." 

"It is the power of the Gods." 

"...what do you mean, consider my future?" 

"A misspeech. More that you must decide whether you have a future at all."

His words stung, and she growled bitterly, "I shouldn't listen to anything you say. You did this, you and your kind." 

"My warriors had no part in this, but if not for 'my kind', you would have died on that gallows, Eva."

" _How do you know that?!_ " she cried, her voice unnaturally loud in the cold, still air.

"I know everything about you, Scaea Evangeline Notte. And I know how important you are." 

"...what?" 

"War is coming, Eva. This is only the first battle of the war that will set the world alight and make the gods themselves take notice, and it is my purpose that we win. And to that end I am gathering the greatest of champions beneath my banner, and you have it in you to be very great indeed."

She tried to say something but he kept going. "Your brothers and sisters are nothing in the face of your skill at war. You fear nothing and you take insult from no man. Your soul sings like a blade leaving its sheath. The battlefield is your home. You know that this is true."

She didn't reply, because he was right. 

"And your will puts the great ones of the Imperium to shame. You will seize the world by the throat and demand of it that it make way. You are marked for greatness, and you know that it is not the mark of the Emperor. The Emperor fears you, and his own have sentenced you to death. 

"But you do not have to die."

He let the sentence hang there, heavy, and she closed her eyes. 

"You have a choice to make, Eva."

"And what is that?"

"You can stay, and I will be gone, and time will flow again. You will die, under the guns of your friends, or under the blades of the berserkers.

"Or you can come with me."

This was heresy. This was the worse than heresy - this was betrayal.

But she had prayed. She had prayed so hard and she had believed, she was sure she had.

And the Emperor had delivered her to _this_.

But she winced as she thought, what would Holling say? She had always considered her husband to be her moral compass. He was a much better person than she was, she thought, and he wouldn't turn his back on the Emperor like this.

And then it occurred to her that he had devoted his life to a god that had abandoned her. Holling's god had watched in silence when His justice had spit on her innocence, and when His sworn man had stood in her defense, He had turned his back and left her to her death.

"I know how this works, witch." 

"Do you?" He frowned.

She opened her eyes. "I know how this goes. You promise me my life, and maybe a little more, if I'll just sell my soul.

"Well," she said, "I want a _damn_ good price for it."

"You ask for a compact." 'Dvoran' tapped his staff a few times on the ground, and then chuckled darkly. "Very well, Eva. What is it that you would ask of me, if you will agree first to serve Chaos Undivided, and second to serve me, in exchange?"

"My husband. Holling Nele. Lives at 46 St. Spiridon's Street, East Middleterrace, in the city. I want him to come with me. I want him out of there, out of that ... that grinder."

"That is your price?" 

"That's my price. Otherwise, none of it means anything, and I'll be glad to die at the sergeant's hands. He'll at least make it quick."

The sorcerer scowled, and tapped on the ground a few more times. The staff made a resonant tone when it clanged on the ground. She wondered, briefly, what it was made of.

After a minute or so, he said, "You must understand before you enter into this compact." He reached out with his left hand, and plucked one of the motionless snowflakes from the air. "What you ask is possible, but difficult, and long in the doing, and by that time your life will be changed. You will be changed. Your feelings for-" 

"That's my price." she growled.

"Then it will be done."

"I suppose you don't swear on the sword." she said. 

He snorted. "No. And now, nor do you. This is my oath, and should I go back on my oath the Changer shall take my fate, and twist it to my ruin."

And he told her the oath, and as she spoke her skin crawled and she felt herself sweating, but she spoke it.

"In the name of the Blood God, wrathful on his throne of skulls, and of the Lord of Decay, merciful beneath his mire, and of the Prince of Chaos, indulgent in his high home in the warp, and of the Changer of the Ways, all-knowing at the heart of his great maze, I swear to serve the will of Chaos Undivided above all, and the will of Dvoran Octavionos, until death claims me, or until our compact is fulfilled."

And he dutifully responded in kind, "In the name of the Blood God, wrathful on his throne of skulls, and of the Lord of Decay, merciful beneath his mire, and of the Prince of Chaos, indulgent in his high home in the warp, and of the Changer of the Ways, all-knowing at the heart of his great maze, I swear that by my will and by my artifice, Holling Nele of Eastmiddle Terrace, St. Michel, shall be reunited in the Domains of Chaos with Eva Notte, as unharmed in body and mind as is within my power."

She tried, with all her strength, to stay on her feet, but the blasphemous words and the scale of what she was doing made her knees give out, and she hated herself for it, and she collapsed.

"Do not think yourself weak." Dvoran said. "You are but mortal, and to swear an oath of such weight is a burden even to the initated." 

"The ... initiated?" 

"Into the mysteries of Chaos. Of the Great Powers. You may find yourself among their numbers, if the proving is in you."

She stood up. "I think, then..." She caught her breath. "...that we'd better get out of here, before the sergeant finishes pulling that trigger. Do you have a transport?"

He smiled. "I do." When he smiled he looked like a death mask.  He reached out his hand. "Come. I will bring you to it."

She reached out, hesitantly, and clasped his hand. His fingers gripped tight. He was _strong_. "Thank you, Eva." he said. 

"For - for what?" 

"For choosing well."

And then he spoke a word and banged the ground with his staff, and they were gone.

 

* * *

 

 **END OF ACT I**  

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Apologies this took so long. Only just now regained access to the computer these were saved on.
> 
> There's one more not-quite-chapter left, and then all previously-completed work on this story, that only required editing and formatting, is posted. Then I'll be writing from scratch again. It's exciting.
> 
> Thanks for reading.


	7. Interlude I

The man's haste as he walked down the corridor was almost indecent. Indeed, so fast was his stride that an onlooker might ask why he didn't just bother to run. His boots squeaked and made loud, moist sounds as he walked, bouncing off the walls of the tranquil space in an unseemly fashion and leaving wet, gray stains on the pristine white floors. Silver servitors hurried in his wake like mortified maids, wiping away the muddy stains and confronting him with tinny, pre-recorded demands.

_"Haste is unadvisable in Clearance Black areas, Master Kolyr. Actions, unless carefully considered and executed, may have unforeseen consequences. You may be subject to censure at a later date."_

_"Environmental conditions in Clearance Black areas are kept carefully balanced, Master Kolyr. Your introduction of foreign silicates and unfiltered fluid is a violation of Procedural Dictate 005b. You may be subject to censure at a later date."_

_"During operation at Territorial level and above, the Steward requires all personnel to maintain duty readiness at all times, including during debriefing, Master Kolyr. You lack your primary armament, and your wargear is in need of repair and reblessing. You may be subject to censure at a later date."_

_"Disharmonious actions, such as-"_

"Shut up." The man growled, flashing his scarlet rosette at the servitors, and they said, _"Yes, Master Kolyr."_ and stopped following him quite so closely.

He didn't care. The maintenance servitors were stupid, new-template models, only present to satisfy the Steward's hypochondriac tendencies, and not privy to the upper command channels. If he were violating any dictates that actually mattered the gun-servitors in the walls would have cut him down long before he made it this far into the Center.

A squad of stormtroopers met him at the final security door. They were not like the Inquisitorial Guard soldiers that had accompanied him to the PDF base. They were Fort Keltros troopers; heavily augmented and mentally conditioned by the Steward and her psykers to turn them into killing machines. They trained hellguns and plasma guns and lethal skitarii shotguns on him as he approached. He knew they were mainly for show; there to divert any intruder's attention and keep them from noticing the heavy auto-defenses and lethal psyker wards built into the walls of the corridor.

He held up his rosette; one of the troopers took it and verified its inlaid geno-key. They double-checked, and then verified the triple-layers of encryption coded into the ceramite rose. Such precautions were necessary; there was a retinal scanner built into the door, but the troopers didn't bother with it.

It wouldn't have worked on the man; his glittering augmetic eyes did not have retinas.

He didn't care much for retinal verification, anyway. If the Archenemy were ever able to get this far, they'd probably just rip out somebody's eye and use that.

" **Clearance confirmed.** " The trooper's voice was a hideous snarl. The hairs on the back of the man's neck stood up, but he didn't let his discomfort show on his face. He understood that the troopers' augmetic vocal cords were specially altered using ancient technological methods to produce a secondary aural wave, laid underneath the sound of the troopers' speech, that directly stimulated the human fear response.

He knew that, but it didn't help. As far as the man with the diamond eyes could tell, the troopers were sabercats or primaeval ursines, and he was a club-wielding primitive cowering in a cave.

He nodded to the trooper, and stepped through the final security door as it opened.

There was another hallway; a short one, this time, devoid of maintenance servitors or guards. The man did not find this odd; he knew, unlike most people, that the labyrinthine security measures that surrounded the Steward were not there for her protection. They were there to protect what she guarded.

The Steward herself had never needed to be protected.

The door sealed behind him, and the man strode forward again.

The awe-inspiring Center was laid out before him, but he had no time to wonder at its technological majesty. He had a report to give. He walked through the forest of hololithic displays, towards the comparatively small desk at the heart of the vast data system, and the even smaller figure seated at it.

The Steward of Adobe sat with her back to him, looking up at the largest of the room's screens. A map of the northern part of Micheline continent was displayed upon it. An aquila labeled ST. MICHEL signified the holy city at the very bottom of it. Further Imperial insignia marked the locations of PDF bases, forming a line between the infested north and Imperial territory. Almost everything north of the line was shrouded in a grey hololithic overlay, and almost everything north of the line was unmarked and empty. A scant number of symbols were scattered throughout the dead zone, showing what small portions of the Archenemy-controlled lands they had managed to chart over the decades.

"The pattern finally shows itself." Said the Steward in her small voice. The man didn't respond. He knew that it was better to let her talk through whatever mystery she was in the process of unraveling.

"Within two Adobe days, outposts Novenus Primaris and Quintus Secundus come under attack by the Archenemy, in unprecedented numbers and yet strangely underwhelming overall strength. Enemy forces are disorganized and undisciplined, and yet manage to penetrate the primary defensive cordon and engage a target on the secondary line. Both bases are taken by surprise and nearly overrun, despite constant aerial reconaissance and satellite overwatch."

A red arrow appeared, moving out of the uncharted north until its point touched the embattled outposts.

"All other bases along the primary line report constant, light pressure by Archenemy skirmishing parties, but all incursions are eliminated from the air before any serious offensive can begin. Enemy is never reported gathering in more than platoon strength. The force that strikes at Novenus Primarus is at least _division_ strength, and moves undetected."

Her fingers moved on the terminal, and two Imperial eagles lit up with white borders, highlighting two of the bases on the map.

"And by the methodical aimlessness of the military bureaucracy and the luck of the devil, the bases that offer the most direct route to her are directly adjacent to the borders of the interference."

The most powerful person on the planet sighed, and turned her chair to face him.

She was short and willowy. Her brown hair hung from her head in elaborate curls and ringlets. She was clad in no armor and wore no weapons, only an exquisitely embroidered scarlet bolero that spilled over the sides of her chair like the tails of a long coat. She steepled her fingers, which were long and very thin. She looked surprisingly hale for a woman who, these days, never set foot outside in the sun.

The man with the diamond eyes knew that she could kill him without getting up from her desk.

"Markus." She said. The Steward never raised her voice. Her face was expressionless. "You have come here in haste."

"I felt the need."

The man had never been sure where the Steward came from. The way she spoke and carried herself suggested that she came from noble stock, but if information about her origin existed in the Inquisitorial databases, he had never been privy to it.

She looked expectantly at him. "Proceed."

"I followed your plan to the letter, inquisitrix." Said the man. "Once we were on the ground Siel confirmed your suspicions. She couldn't even look at Notte. So, I encouraged the commissar to stage a formal execution. He was forced to kill the base commander when he tried to intervene on Notte's behalf. For a moment I thought the volunteers were going to mutiny - they were loyal to her, just as you predicted - but the commissar kept control."

He drew a breath. "Then the Archenemy hit us. The adepts at Ground Control thought that seventh-circle _jhorair_ they killed at Novenus Primarus was the leader. The real attack hit us, on the second line. I'm starting to understand why you don't believe in coincidence."

She didn't even blink. "Your report, Markus."

"Apologies, inquisitrix." He cleared his throat. "You should commend Siel. The Archenemy started bombarding the base and she was the only reason I survived. Most of my men were killed, but we managed to fight our way back to the gunship and take off. Unfortunately before we could get clear the _real_ enemy commander showed himself and pulled my ship out of the sky. With a tow cable, I might add."

She looked unimpressed. "Continue, Markus."

He sighed. "That's where it ends. Some hundred volunteers managed to escape the base, and made a successful fighting retreat. Only Siel, Taiste, one of my sergeants, and myself survived the crash. We shot our way out of the wreck and then Siel ... took us home."

He shuddered, very slightly.

"I gave the order to purge personally, immediately upon arrival."

The Steward entered another command. The symbol denoting Quintus Secundus became a hollow, black outline of an aquila, and the word **PURGATUS** appeared next to it.

"And Notte?" asked the Steward, gazing keenly at him.

"She was noosed, and her hands were bound. I saw the gallows take a direct hit."

"But you never saw a body."

He paused, and then slowly shook his head.

She considered him a moment more and then closed her eyes. "She is not dead, Markus."

"You're certain."

"In the last few hours, the probability of the Undivided scenario has begun to increase. Dramatically."

He stared.

"Then we failed." His voice was hoarse. " _I_ failed."  His bones were cold from the blizzard and the warp transit. "I should have shot her the second I saw her!"

"If the arm fails to strike, when the eyes are blinded and the mind is without wisdom, it is not the fault of the arm." murmured the Steward. "You followed my orders. It is no fault of yours." She still looked so young, but at times, when the weight of responsibility bore down on her so heavily, he could see the limits of the juvenat, the lines at the corners of her eyes, the tightness of her skin over the bones of her face. "I sought to make an example of her before the Domains, to sacrifice her on the Emperor's altar..."

Golden Throne, she looked old.

"...and for my hubris, we may all pay with our lives."

She looked up at him. "Proceed to Continental operational level. I will give the order to proceed to the units on the border. You will join Taiste and Jak Harman in command, as soon as you return from your next mission. The surviving members of Notte's unit are to be disposed of."

His face hardened. "You are sure?"

"Their lives have been touched by her." said the Steward with utter certainty. "Whether she has affected them for good or ill, they are better off dead. Not servitors. Dead."

"And the officers, who'll latch on to that handful of volunteers with real combat experience? What do I tell Grand?" he demanded.

"Why should you tell him anything?" Her voice was perfectly level. "Take a detachment. Find them out in the flatlands. Kill them all. And burn the bodies, Markus."

It was his job to kill men without hesitation or compunction, and yet the complete absence of mercy he saw in the Steward at times like this chilled him. "It is by the will of the Inquisition that they shall live or they shall die." she intoned, fixing him with her cold eyes. "And I _am_ the Inquisition."

She didn't look old anymore.

"You will oversee this personally, Markus. Do you understand?"

He nodded. "Yes, Inquisitrix. The storm is getting more severe. Meteorologica is predicting that it may become a blizzard. The gunships-"

"Keep at it as long as you can. The diviners will guide you."

"Yes, Inquisitrix."

"Have you anything further to report?"

"Yes, Inquisitrix... there's the matter of the survivor that we picked up. It was against procedure, but Siel insisted. I made the call to bring her, I take full responsibilty."

"You were correct to listen to Siel. Send her to me, and then send the survivor, as well. She has appeared in the pattern many times. I think we can make use of her."

The Steward turned back to her console, to her endless columns of secrets. "You are dismissed, Markus." She said.

Diamond-Eyes turned and walked from the room, back through the gauntlet of scanners and checkpoints and security, already going over the preparations for the detachment in his mind. He had a hundred innocent men and women to murder, and the thing had to be done properly.


End file.
